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THE  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 


THE 
BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 


BY 

CHARLES   FORT 


BONI    AND     LIVERIGHT 

PUBLISHERS.  NEW     YORK, 


COPYRIGHT,  1919, 
BONI  AND  LlVEEIGHT,  INC. 


Firtt  printing,  December,  1919 
Second  printing,  February,  1920 


Printed  in  the  V.  5.  A. 


THE  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 


470736 


• 

I 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 


CHAPTER  I 

A  PROCESSION  of  the  damned. 
By  the  damned,  I  mean  the  excluded. 

We  shall  have  a  procession  of  data  that  Science  has  excluded. 

Battalions  of  the  accursed,  captained  by  pallid  data  that  I  have 
exhumed,  will  march.  You'll  read  them — or  they'll  march.  Some 
of  them  livid  and  some  of  them  fiery  and  some  of  them  rotten. 

Some  of  them  are  corpses,  skeletons,  mummies,  twitching,  totter- 
ing, animated  by  companions  that  have  been  damned  alive.  There 
are  giants  that  will  walk  by,  though  sound  asleep.  There  are  things 
that  are  theorems  and  things  that  are  rags:  they'll  go  by  like 
Euclid  arm  in  arm  with  the  spirit  of  anarchy.  Here  and  there 
will  flit  little  harlots.  Many  are  clowns.  But  many  are  of  the 
highest  respectability.  Some  are  assassins.  There  are  pale  stenches 
and  gaunt  superstitions  and  mere  shadows  and  lively  malices:  whims 
and  amiabilities.  The  nai've  and  the  pedantic  and  the  bizarre  and 
the  grotesque  and  the  sincere  and  the  insincere,  the  profound  and 
the  puerile.  , 

A  stab  and  a  laugh  and  the  patiently  folded  hands  of  hopeless 
propriety. 

The  ultra-respectable,  but  the  condemned,  anyway. 

The  aggregate  appearance  is  of  dignity  and  dissoluteness:  the  ag- 
gregate voice  is  a  defiant  prayer:  but  the  spirit  of  the  whole  ;s  pro- 
cessional. 

The  power  that  has  said  to  all  these  things  that  they  are  damned, 
is  Dogmatic  Science. 

But  they'll  march. 

The  little  harlots  will  caper,  and  freaks  will  distract  attention, 
and  the  clowns  will  break  the  rhythm  of  the  whole  with  their  buf- 
fooneries— but  the  solidity  of  the  procession  as  a  whole:  the  im- 
pressiveness  of  things  that  pass  and  pass  and  pass,  and  keep  on  and 
keep  on  and  keep  on  coming. 


B££>K'OF  THE  DAMNED 

The  irresistibleness  of  things  that  neither  threaten  nor  jeer  nor 
defy,  but  arrange  themselves  in  mass-formations  that  pass  and  pass 
keep  on  passing. 


So,  by  the  damned,  I  mean  the  excluded. 

But  by  the  excluded  I  mean  that  which  will  some  day  be  the 
excluding. 

Or  everything  that  is,  won't  be. 

And  everything  that  isn't,  will  be  - 

But,  of  course,  will  be  that  which  won't  be  - 

It  is  our  expression  that  the  flux  between  that  which  isn't  and 
that  which  won't  be,  or  the  state  that  is  commonly  and  absurdly 
called  "existence,"  is  a  rhythm  of  heavens  and  hells:  that  the 
damned  won't  stay  damned;  that  salvation  only  precedes  perdition. 
The  inference  is  that  some  day  our  accursed  tatterdemalions  will 
be  sleek  angels.  Then  the  sub-inference  is  that  some  later  day, 
back  they'll  go  whence  they  came. 

It  is  our  expression  that  nothing  can  attempt  to  be,  except  by 
attempting  to  exclude  something  else:  that  that  which  is  commonly 
called  "being"  is  a  state  that  is  wrought  more  or  less  definitely 
proportionately  to  the  appearance  of  positive  difference  between 
that  which  is  included  and  that  which  is  excluded. 

But  it  is  our  expression  that  there  are  no  positive  differences: 
that  all  things  are  like  a  mouse  and  a  bug  in  the  heart  of  a  cheese. 
Mouse  and  a  bug:  no  two  things  could  seem  more  unlike.  They're 
there  a  week,  or  they  stay  there  a  month:  both  are  then  only  trans- 
mutations of  cheese.  I  think  we're  all  bugs  and  mice,  and  are  only 
different  expressions  of  an  all-inclusive  cheese. 

Or  that  red  is  not  positively  different  from  yellow:  is  only  another 
degree  of  whatever  vibrancy  yellow  is  a  degree  of:  that  red  and 
yellow  are  continuous,  or  that  they  merge  in  orange. 

So  then  that,  if,  upon  the  basis  of  yellowness  and  redness,  Scien  e 
should  attempt  to  classify  all  phenomena,  including  all  red  things 
as  veritable,  and  excluding  all  yellow  things  as  false  or  illusory, 
the  demarcation  would  have  to  be  false  and  arbitrary,  because 
things  colored  orange,  constituting  continuity,  would  belong  on  both 
sides  of  the  attempted  border-line. 

As  we  go  along,  we  shall  be  impressed  with  this: 

That  no  basis  for  classification,  or  inclusion  and  exclusion,  more 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  9 

reasonable  than  that  of  redness  and  yellowness  has  ever  been  con- 
ceived of. 

Science  has,  by  appeal  to  various  bases,  included  a  multitude  of 
data.  Had  it  not  done  so,  there  would  be  nothing  with  which 
to  seem  to  be.  Science  has,  by  appeal  to  various  bases,  excluded  a 
multitude  of  data.  Then,  if  redness  is  continuous  with  yellowness: 
if  every  basis  of  admission  is  continuous  with  every  basis  of  ex- 
clusion, Science  must  have  excluded  some  things  that  are  continuous 
with  the  accepted.  In  redness  and  yellowness,  which  merge  in 
orangeness,  we  typify  all  tests,  all  standards,  all  means  of  forming 
an  opinion 

Or  that  any  positive  opinion  upon  any  subject  is  illusion  built 
upon  the  fallacy  that  there  are  positive  differences  to  judge  by • 

That  the  quest  of  all  intellection  has  been  for  something — a  fact, 
a  basis,  a  generalization,  law,  formula,  a  major  premise  that  is  posi- 
tive: that  the  best  that  has  ever  been  done  has  been  to  say  that 
some  things  are  self-evident — whereas,  by  evidence  we  mean  the 
support  of  something  else 

That  this  is  the  quest;  but  that  it  has  never  been  attained;  but 
that  Science  has  acted,  ruled,  pronounced,  and  condemned  as  if  it 
had  been  attained. 

What  is  a  house? 

It  is  not  possible  to  say  what  anything  is,  as  positively  distin- 
guished from  anything  else,  if  there  are  no  positive  differences. 

A  barn  is  a  house,  if  one  lives  in  it.  If  residence  constitutes 
houseness,  because  style  of  architecture  does  not,  then  a  bird's  nest 
is  a  house:  and  human  occupancy  is  not  the  standard  to  judge  by, 
because  we  speak  of  dogs'  houses;  nor  material,  because  we  speak  of 
snow  houses  of  Eskimos — or  a  shell  is  a  house  to  a  hermit  crab— or 
was  to  the  mollusk  that  made  it — or  things  seemingly  so  positively 
different  as  the  White  House  at  Washington  and  a  shell  on  the  sea- 
shore are  seen  to  be  continuous. 

So  no  one  has  ever  been  able  to  say  what  electricity  is,  for  in- 
stance. It  isn'l  anything,  as  positively  distinguished  from  heat  or 
magnetism  or  life.  Metaphysicians  and  theologians  and  biologists 
have  tried  to  define  life.  They  have  failed,  because,  in  a  positive 
sense,  there  is  nothing  to  define:  there  is  no  phenomenon  of  life 
that  is  not,  to  some  degree,  manifest  in  chemism,  magnetism,  as- 
tronomic motions. 

White  coral  islands  in  a  dark  blue  sea. 

Their  seeming  of  distinctness:  the  seeming  of  individuality,  or  of 


io  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

positive  difference  one  from  another — but  all  are  only  projections 
fro^i  the  same  sea  bottom.  The  difference  between  sea  and  land  is 
i)jt  positive.  In  all  water  there  is  some  earth:  in  all  earth  there  is 
some  water. 

So  then  that  all  seeming  things  are  not  things  at  all,  if  all  are 
inter-continuous,  any  more  than  is  the  leg  of  a  table  a  thing  in 
itself,  if  it  is  only  a  projection  from  something  else:  that  not  one 
of  us  is  a  real  person,  if,  physically,  we're  continuous  with  environ- 
ment; if,  psychically,  there  is  nothing  to  us  but  expression  of  rela- 
tion to  environment. 

Our  general  expression  has  two  aspects: 

Conventional  monism,  or  that  all  "things"  that  seem  to  have 
identity  of  their  own  are  only  islands  that  are  projections  from 
something  underlying,  and  have  no  real  outlines  of  their  own. 

But  that  all  "things,"  though  only  projections,  are  projections  that 
are  striving  to  break  away  from  the  underlying  that  denies  them 
identity  of  their  own. 

I  conceive  of  one  inter-continuous  nexus,  in  which  and  of  which, 
all  seeming  things  are  only  different  expressions,  but  in  which  all 
things  are  localizations  of  one  attempt  to  break  away  and  become 
real  things,  or  to  establish  entity  or  positive  difference  or  final  de- 
marcation or  unmodified  independence — or  personality  or  soul,  as  it 
is  called  in  human  phenomena 

That  anything  that  tries  to  establish  itself  as  a  real,  or  positive, 
or  absolute  system,  government,  organization,  self,  soul,  entity,  in- 
dividuality, can  so  attempt  only  by  drawing  a  line  about  itself,  or 
about  the  inclusions  that  constitute  itself,  and  damning  or  excluding, 
or  breaking  away  from,  all  other  "things": 

That,  if  it  does  not  so  act,  it  can  not  seem  to  be; 

That,  if  it  does  so  act,  it  falsely  and  arbitrarily  and  futilely  and 
disastrously  acts,  just  as  would  one  who  draws  a  circle  in  the  sea, 
including  a  few  waves,  saying  that  the  other  waves,  with  which  the 
included  are  continuous,  are  positively  different,  and  stakes  his  life 
upon  maintaining  that  the  admitted  and  the  damned  are  positively 
different. 

Our  expression  is  that  our  whole  existence  is  animation  of  the 
local  by  an  ideal  that  is  realizable  only  in  the  universal: 

That,  if  all  exclusions  are  false,  because  always  are  included  and 
excluded  continuous:  that  if  all  seeming  of  existence  perceptible  to 
us  is  the  product  of  exclusion,  there  is  nothing  that  is  perceptible 
to  us  that  really  is:  that  only  the  universal  can  really  be. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Our  especial  interest  is  in  modem  science  as  a  manifestation  of 
this  one  ideal  or  purpose  or  process: 

That  it  has  falsely  excluded,  because  there  are  no  positive  stand- 
ards to  judge  by :  that  it  has  excluded  things  that,  by  its  own  pseudo- 
standards,  have  as  much  right  to  come  in  as  have  the  chosen. 

s  s  > 

Our  general  expression: 

That  the  state  that  is  commonly  and  absurdly  called  "existence," 
is  a  flow,  or  a  current,  or  an  attempt,  from  negativeness  to  positive- 
ness,  and  is  intermediate  to  both. 

By  positiveness  we  mean: 

Harmony,  equilibrium,  order,  regularity,  stability,  consistency, 
unity,  realness,  system,  government,  organization,  liberty,  independ- 
ence, soul,  self,  personality,  entity,  individuality,  truth,  beauty,  jus- 
tice, perfection,  definiteness 

That  all  that  is  called  development,  progress,  or  evolution  is  move- 
ment toward,  or  attempt  toward,  this  state  for  which,  or  for  aspects 
of  which,  there  are  so  many  names,  all  of  which  are  summed  up  in 
the  one  word  "positiveness." 

At  first  this  summing  up  may  not  be  very  readily  acceptable. 
At  first  it  may  seem  that  all  these  words  are  not  synonyms:  that 
"harmony"  may  mean  "order,"  but  that  by  "independence,"  for  in- 
stance, we  do  not  mean  "truth,"  or  that  by  "stability"  we  do  not 
mean  "beauty,"  or  "system,"  or  "justice." 

I  conceive  of  one  inter-continuous  nexus,  which  expresses  itself 
in  astronomic  phenomena,  and  chemic,  biologic,  psychic,  sociologic: 
that  it  is  everywhere  striving  to  localize  positiveness:  that  to  this 
attempt  in  various  fields  of  phenomena — which  are  only  quasi-dif- 
ferent— we  give  different  names.  We  speak  of  the  "system"  of  the 
planets,  and  not  of  their  "government":  but  in  considering  a  store, 
for  instance,  and  its  management,  we  see  that  the  words  are  inter- 
changeable. It  used  to  be  customary  to  speak  of  chemic  equilibrium, 
but  not  of  social  equilibrium:  that  false  demarcation  has  been  broken 
down.  We  shall  see  that  by  all  these  words  we  mean  the  same  state. 
As  every-day  conveniences,  or  in  terms  of  common  illusions,  of 
course,  they  are  not  synonyms.  To  a  child  an  earth  worm  is  not  an 
animal.  It  is  to  the  biologist. 

By  "beauty,"  I  mean  that  which  seems  complete. 

Obversely,  that  the  incomplete,  or  the  mutilated,  is  the  ugly. 

Venus  de  Milo. 

To  a  child  sh^  is  ugly. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

When  a  mind  adjusts  to  thinking  of  her  as  a  completeness,  even 
though,  by  physiologic  standards,  incomplete,  she  is  beautiful. 

A  hand  thought  of  only  as  a  hand,  may  seem  beautiful. 

Found  on  a  battlefield — obviously  a  part — not  beautiful. 

But  everything  in  our  experience  is  only  a  part  of  something  else 
that  in  turn  is  only  a  part  of  still  something  else — or  that  there  is 
nothing  beautiful  in  our  experience:  only  appearances  that  are  in- 
termediate to  beauty  and  ugliness — that  only  universality  is  com- 
plete: that  only  the  complete  is  the  beautiful:  that  every  attempt 
to  achieve  beauty  is  an  attempt  to  give  to  the  local  the  attribute  of 
the  universal. 

By  stability,  we  mean  the  immovable  and  the  unaffected.  But  all 
seeming  things  are  only  reactions  to  something  else.  Stability,  too, 
then,  can  be  only  the  universal,  or  that  besides  which  there  is 
nothing  else.  Though  some  things  seem  to  have — or  have — higher 
approximations  to  stability  than  have  others,  there  are,  in  our  ex- 
perience, only  various  degrees  of  intermediateness  to  stability  and 
instability.  Every  man,  then,  who  works  for  stability  under  its 
various  names  of  "permanency,"  "survival,"  "duration,"  is  striving 
to  localize  in  something  the  state  that  is  realizable  only  in  the  uni- 
versal. 

By  independence,  entity,  and  individuality,  I  can  mean  only  that 
besides  which  there  is  nothing  else,  if  given  only  two  things,  they 
must  be  continuous  and  mutually  affective,  if  everything  is  only  a 
reaction  to  something  else,  and  any  two  things  would  be  destructive 
of  each  other's  independence,  entity,  or  individuality. 

All  attempted  organizations  and  systems  and  consistencies,  some 
approximating  far  higher  than  others,  but  all  only  intermediate  to 
Order  and  Disorder,  fail  eventually  because  of  their  relations  with 
outside  forces.  All  are  attempted  completenesses.  If  to  all  local 
phenomena  there  are  always  outside  forces,  these  attempts,  too,  are 
realizable  only  in  the  state  of  completeness,  or  that  to  which  there 
are  no  outside  forces. 

Or  that  all  these  words  are  synonyms,  all  meaning  the  state  that 
we  call  the  positive  state 

That  our  whole  "existence"  is  a  striving  for  the  positive  state. 

The  amazing  paradox  of  it  all: 

That  all  things  are  trying  to  become  the  universal  by  excluding 
other  things. 

That  there  is  only  this  one  process,  and  that  it  does  animate  all 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  iv 

expressions,  in  all  fields  of  phenomena,  of  that  which  we  think  of  as 
one  inter-continuous  nexus: 

The  religious  and  their  idea  or  ideal  of  the  soul.  They  mean  dis- 
tinct, stable  entity,  or  a  state  that  is  independent,  and  not  a  mere 
flux  of  vibrations  or  complex  of  reactions  to  environment,  continuous 
with  environment,  merging  away  with  an  infinitude  of  other  inter- 
dependent complexes. 

But  the  only  thing  that  would  not  merge  away  into  something  else 
would  be  that  besides  which  there  is  nothing  else. 

That  Truth  is  only  another  name  for  the  positive  state,  or  that 
the  quest  for  Truth,  is  the  attempt  to  achieve  positiveness: 

Scientists  who  have  thought  that  they  were  seeking  Truth,  but  who 
were  trying  to  find  out  astronomic,  or  chemic,  or  biologic  truths. 
But  Truth  is  that  besides  which  there  is  nothing:  nothing  to  modify 
it,  nothing  to  question  it,  nothing  to  form  an  exception:  the  all- 
inclusive,  the  complete 

By  Truth  I  mean  the  Universal. 

So  chemists  have  sought  the  true,  or  the  real,  and  have  always 
failed  in  their  endeavors,  because  of  the  outside  relations  of  chemical 
phenomena:  have  failed  in  the  sense  that  never  has  a  chemical  law, 
without  exceptions,  been  discovered:  because  chemistry  is  continuous 
with  astronomy,  physics,  biology — For  instance,  if  the  sun  should 
greatly  change  its  distance  from  this  earth,  and  if  human  life  could 
survive,  the  familiar  chemic  formulas  would  no  longer  work  out:  a 
new  science  of  chemistry  would  have  to  be  learned 

Or  that  all  attempts  to  find  Truth  in  the  special  are  attempts  to 
find  the  universal  in  the  local. 

And  artists  and  their  striving  for  positiveness,  under  the  name  of 
"harmony" — but  their  pigments  that  are  oxydizing,  or  are  respond- 
ing to  a  deranging  environment — or  the  strings  of  musical  instru- 
ments that  are  differently  and  disturbingly  adjusting  to  outside 
chemic  and  thermal  and  gravitational  forces — again  and  again  this 
oneness  of  all  ideals,  and  that  it  is  the  attempt  to  be,  or  to  achieve, 
locally,  that  which  is  realizable  only  universally.  In  our  experi- 
ence there  is  only  intermediateness  to  harmony  and  discord.  Har- 
mony is  that  besides  which  there  are  no  outside  forces. 

And  nations  that  have  fought  with  only  one  motive:  for  indi- 
viduality, or  entity,  or  to  be  real,  final  nations,  not  subordinate  to, 
or  parts  of,  other  nations.  And  that  nothing  but  intermediateness 
has  ever  been  attained,  and  that  history  is  record  of  failures  of 


.4  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

this  one  attempt,  because  there  always  have  been  outside  forces,  or 
other  nations  contending  for  the  same  goal. 

As  to  physical  things,  chemic,  mineralogic,  astronomic,  it  is  not 
customary  to  say  that  they  act  to  achieve  Truth  or  Entity,  but  it  is 
understood  that  all  motions  are  toward  Equilibrium:  that  there  is 
no  motion  except  toward  Equilibrium,  of  course  always  away  from 
some  other  approximation  to  Equilibrium. 

All  biologic  phenomena  act  to  adjust:  there  are  no  biologic  actions 
other  than  adjustments. 

Adjustment  is  another  name  for  Equilibrium.  Equilibrium  is  the 
Universal,  or  that  which  has  nothing  external  to  derange  it. 

But  that  all  that  we  call  "being"  is  motion:  and  that  all  motion 
is  the  expression,  not  of  equilibrium,  but  of  equilibrating,  or  of 
equilibrium  unattained:  that  life-motions  are  expressions  of  equi- 
librium unattained:  that  all  thought  relates  to  the  unattained:  that 
to  have  what  is  called  being  in  our  quasi-state,  is  not  to  be  in  the 
positive  sense,  or  is  to  be  intermediate  to  Equilibrium  and  Inequi- 
librium. 

So  then: 

That  all  phenomena  in  our  intermediate  state,  or  quasi-state, 
represent  this  one  attempt  to  organize,  stabilize,  harmonize,  indi- 
vidualize— or  to  positivize,  or  to  become  real: 

That  only  to  have  seeming  is  to  express  failure  or  intermediate- 
ness  to  final  failure  and  final  success; 

That  every  attempt — that  is  observable — is  defeated  by  Conti- 
nuity, or  by  outside  forces — or  by  the  excluded  that  are  continuous 
with  the  included: 

That  our  whole  "existence"  is  an  attempt  by  the  relative  to  be 
the  absolute,  or  by  the  local  to  be  the  universal. 

In  this  book,  my  interest  is  in  this  attempt  as  manifested  in 
modern  science: 

That  it  has  attempted  to  be  real,  true,  final,  complete,  absolute: 

That,  if  the  seeming  of  being,  here,  in  our  quasi-state,  is  the 
product  of  exclusion  that  is  always  false  and  arbitrary,  if  always 
are  included  and  excluded  continuous,  the  whole  seeming  system, 
or  entity,  of  modern  science  is  only  quasi-system,  or  quasi-entity, 
wrought  by  the  same  false  and  arbitrary  process  as  that  by  which 
the  still  less  positive  system  that  preceded  it,  or  the  theological 
system,  wrought  the  illusion  of  its  being. 

In  this  book,  I  assemble  some  of  the  data  that  I  think  are  of  the 
falsely  and  arbitrarily  excluded. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  15 

The  data  of  the  damned. 

I  have  gone  into  the  outer  darkness  of  scientific  and  philosophical 
transactions  and  proceedings,  ultra-respectable,  but  covered  with 
the  dust  of  disregard.  I  have  descended  into  journalism.  I  have 
come  back  with  the  quasi-souls  of  lost  data. 

They  will  march. 

As  to  the  logic  of  our  expressions  to  come 

That  there  is  only  quasi-logic  in  our  mode  of  seeming: 

That  nothing  ever  has  been  proved 

Because  there  is  nothing  to  prove. 

When  I  say  that  there  is  nothing  to  prove,  I  mean  that  to  those 
who  accept  Continuity,  or  the  merging  away  of  all  phenomena  into 
other  phenomena,  without  positive  demarcations  one  from  another, 
there  is,  in  a  positive  sense,  no  one  thing.  There  is  nothing  to  prove. 

For  instance  nothing  can  be  proved  to  be  an  animal — because 
animalness  and  vegetableness  are  not  positively  different.  There 
are  some  expressions  of  life  that  are  as  much  vegetable  as  animal, 
or  that  represent  the  merging  of  animalness  and  vegetableness. 
There  is  then  no  positive  test,  standard,  criterion,  means  of  forming 
an  opinion.  As  distinct  from  vegetables,  animals  do  not  exist. 
There  is  nothing  to  prove.  Nothing  could  be  proved  to  be  good, 
for  instance.  There  is  nothing  in  our  "existence"  that  is  good,  in  a 
positive  sense,  or  as  really  outlined  from  evil.  If  to  forgive  be  good 
in  times  of  peace,  it  is  evil  in  wartime.  There  is  nothing  to  prove: 
good  in  our  experience  is  continuous  with,  or  is  only  another  aspect 
of  evil. 

As  to  what  I'm  trying  to  do  now — I  accept  only.  If  I  can't  see 
universally,  I  only  localize. 

So,  of  course  then,  that  nothing  ever  has  been  proved: 

That  theological  pronouncements  are  as  much  open  to  doubt 
as  ever  they  were,  but  that,  by  a  hypnotizing  process,  they  became 
dominant  over  the  majority  of  minds  in  their  era; 

That,  in  a  succeeding  era,  the  laws,  dogmas,  formulas,  principles, 
of  materialistic  science  never  were  proved,  because  they  are  only 
localizations  simulating  the  universal;  but  that  the  leading  minds 
of  their  era  of  dominance  were  hypnotized  into  more  or  less  firmly 
believing  them. 

Newton's  three  laws,  and  that  they  are  attempts  to  achieve  posi- 
tiveness,  or  to  defy  and  break  Continuity,  and  are  as  unreal  as  are 
all  other  attempts  to  localize  the  universal: 


r6  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

That,  if  every  observable  body  is  continuous,  mediately  or  im- 
mediately, with  all  other  bodies,  it  can  not  be  influenced  only  by 
its  own  inertia,  so  that  there  is  no  way  cf  knowing  what  the  phe- 
nomena of  inertia  may  be;  that,  if  all  things  are  reacting  to  an  in- 
finitude of  forces,  there  is  no  way  of  knowing  what  the  effects  of 
only  one  impressed  force  would  be;  that  if  every  reaction  is  con- 
tinuous with  its  action,  it  can  not  be  conceived  of  as  a  whole,  and 
that  there  is  no  way  of  conceiving  what  it  might  be  equal  and 
opposite  to 

Or  that  Newton's  three  laws  are  three  articles  of  faith; 

Or  that  demons  and  angels  and  inertias  and  reactions  are  all 
mythological  characters; 

But  that,  in  their  eras  of  dominance,  they  were  almost  as  firmly 
believed  in  as  if  they  had  been  proved. 

Enormities  and  preposterousnesses  will  march. 
They  will  be  "proved"  as  well  as  Moses  or  Darwin  or  Lyell  ever 
"proved"  anything. 

We  substitute  acceptance  for  belief. 

Cells  of  an  embryo  take  on  different  appearances  in  different  eras. 

The  more  firmly  established,  the  more  difficult  to  change. 

That  social  organism  is  embryonic. 

That  firmly  to  believe  is  to  impede  development. 

That  only  temporarily  to  accept  is  to  facilitate. 

But: 

Except  that  we  substitute  acceptance  for  belief,  our  methods  will 
be  the  conventional  methods;  the  means  by  which  every  belief  has 
been  formulated  and  supported :  or  our  methods  will  be  the  method? 
of  theologians  and  savages  and  scientists  and  children.  Because, 
if  all  phenomena  are  continuous,  there  can  be  no  positively  different 
methods.  By  the  inconclusive  means  and  methods  of  cardinal?  and 
fortune  tellers  and  evolutionists  and  peasants,  methods  which  must 
be  inconclusive,  if  they  relate  always  to  the  local,  and  if  there  is 
nothing  local  to  conclude,  we  shall  write  this  book. 

If  it  function  as  an  expression  of  its  era,  it  will  prevail. 

All  sciences  begin  with  attempts  to  define. 
Nothing  ever  has  been  defined. 
Because  there  is  nothing  to  define. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  17 

Darwin  wrote  "The  Origin  of  Species." 

He  was  never  able  to  tell  what  he  meant  by  a  "species." 

It  is  not  possible  to  define. 

Nothing  has  ever  been  finally  found  out. 

Because  there  is  nothing  final  to  find  out. 

It's  like  looking  for  a  needle  that  no  one  ever  lost  in  a  haystack 
that  never  was 

But  that  all  scientific  attempts  really  to  find  out  something, 
whereas  really  there  is  nothing  to  find  out,  are  attempts,  themselves, 
really  to  be  something. 

A  seeker  of  Truth.  He  will  never  find  it.  But  the  dimmest  of 
possibilities — he  may  himself  become  Truth. 

Or  that  science  is  more  than  an  inquiry: 

That  is  it  a  pseudo-construction,  or  a  quasi-organization:  that  it 
is  an  attempt  to  break  away  and  locally  establish  harmony,  stability, 
equilibrium,  consistency,  entity 

Dimmest  of  possibilities — that  it  may  succeed. 

That  ours  is  a  pseudo-existence,  and  that  all  appearances  in  it 
partake  of  its  essential  fictitiousness 

But  that  some  appearances  approximate  far  more  highly  to  the 
positive  state  than  do  others. 

We  conceive  of  all  "things"  as  occupying  gradations,  or  steps  in 
series  between  positiveness  and  negativeness,  or  realness  and  unreal- 
ness:  that  some  seeming  things  are  more  nearly  consistent,  just, 
beautiful,  unified,  individual,  harmonious,  stable — than  others. 

We  are  not  realists.  We  are  not  idealists.  We  are  intermediat- 
ists — that  nothing  is  real,  but  that  nothing  is  unreal:  that  all  phe- 
nomena are  approximations  one  way  or  the  other  between  realness 
and  unrealness. 

So  then: 

That  our  whole  quasi-existence  is  an  intermediate  stage  between 
positiveness  and  negativeness  or  realness  and  unrealness. 

Like  purgatory,  I  think. 

But  in  our  summing  up,  which  was  very  sketchily  done,  we  omit- 
ted to  make  clear  that  Realness  is  an  aspect  of  the  positive  state. 

By  Realness,  I  mean  that  which  does  not  merge  away  into  some- 
thing else,  and  that  which  is  not  partly  something  else:  that  which 
is  not  a  reaction,  to,  or  an  imitation  of,  something  else.  By  a  real 
hero,  we  mean  one  who  is  not  partly  a  coward,  or  whose  actions  and 
notives  do  not  merge  away  into  cowardice.  But,  if  in  Continuity, 


i8  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

all  things  do  merge,  by  Realness,  I  mean  the  Universal,  besides 
which  there  is  nothing  with  which  to  merge. 

That,  though  the  local  might  be  universalized,  it  is  not  conceiv- 
able that  the  universal  can  be  localized:  but  that  high  approxima- 
tions there  may  be,  and  that  these  approximate  successes  may  be 
translated  out  of  Intermediateness  into  Realness — quite  as,  in  a 
relative  sense,  the  industrial  world  recruits  itself  by  translating  out 
of  unrealness,  or  out  of  the  seemingly  less  real  imaginings  of  in- 
ventors, machines  which  seem,  when  set  up  in  factories,  to  have 
more  of  Realness  than  they  had  when  only  imagined. 

That  all  progress,  if  all  progress  is  toward  stability,  organization, 
harmony,  consistency,  or  positiveness,  is  the  attempt  to  become 
real. 

So,  then,  in  general  metaphysical  terms,  our  expression  is  that,  like 
a  purgatory,  all  that  is  commonly  called  "existence,"  which  we  call 
Intermediateness,  is  quasi-existence,  neither  real  nor  unreal,  but 
expression  of  attempt  to  become  real,  or  to  generate  for  or  recruit 
a  real  existence. 

Our  acceptance  is  that  Science,  though  usually  thought  of  so 
specifically,  or  in  its  own  local  terms,  usually  supposed  to  be  a 
prying  into  old  bones,  bugs,  unsavory  messes,  is  an  expression  of 
this  one  spirit  animating  all  Intermediateness:  that,  if  Science  could 
absolutely  exclude  all  data  but  its  own  present  data,  or  that  which 
is  assimilable  with  the  present  quasi-organization,  it  would  be  a 
real  system,  with  positively  definite  outlines — it  would  be  real. 

Its  seeming  approximation  to  consistency,  stability,  system — 
positiveness  or  realness — is  sustained  by  damning  the  irreconcilable 
or  the  unassimilable 

All  would  be  well. 

All  would  be  heavenly — - 

If  the  damned  would  only  stay  damned. 


CHAPTER  II 

IN  the  autumn  of  1883,  and  for  years  afterward,  occurred  bril- 
liant-colored sunsets,  such  as  had  never  been  seen  before,  within 
the  memory  of  all  observers.  Also  there  were  blue  moons. 

I  think  that  one  is  likely  to  smile  incredulously  at  the  notion  of 
blue  moons.  Nevertheless  they  were  as  common  as  were  green  suns 
in  1883. 

Science  had  to  account  for  these  unconventionalities.  Such  pub- 
lications as  Nature  and  Knowledge  were  besieged  with  inquiries. 

I  suppose,  in  Alaska  and  in  the  South  Sea  Islands,  all  the  medi- 
cine men  were  similarly  upon  trial. 

Something  had  to  be  thought  of. 

Upon  the  28th  of  August,  1883,  the  volcano  of  Krakatoa,  of  the 
Straits  of  Sunda,  had  blown  up. 

Terrific. 

We're  told  that  the  sound  was  heard  2,000  miles,  and  that  36,3^0 
persons  were  killed.  Seems  just  a  little  unscientific,  or  impositive, 
to  me:  marvel  to  me  we're  not  told  2,163  miles  and  36,387  persons. 
The  volume  of  smoke  that  went  up  must  have  been  visible  to  other 
planets — or,  tormented  with  our  crawlings  and  scurryings,  the  earth 
complained  to  Mars;  swore  a  vast  black  oath  at  us. 

In  all  text-books  that  mention  this  occurrence — no  exception  so 
far  as  I  have  read — it  is  said  that  the  extraordinary  atmospheric 
effects  of  1883  were  first  noticed  in  the  last  of  August  or  the  first 
of  September. 

That  makes  a  difficulty  for  us. 

It  is  said  that  these  phenomena  were  caused  by  particles  of  vol- 
canic dust  that  were  cast  high  in  the  air  by  Krakatoa. 

This  is  the  explanation  that  was  agreed  upon  in  1883 

But  for  seven  years  the  atmospheric  phenomena  continued 

Except  that,  in  the  seven,  there  was  a  lapse  of  several  years — 
and  where  was  the  volcanic  dust  all  that  time? 

You'd  think  that  such  a  question  as  that  would  make  trouble? 

Then  you  haven't  studied  hypnosis.  You  have  never  tried  to 
demonstrate  to  a  hypnotic  that  a  table  is  not  a  hippopotamus. 

19 


20  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

According  to  our  general  acceptance,  it  would  be  impossible  to  dem- 
onstrate such  a  thing.  Point  out  a  hundred  reasons  for  saying  that 
a  hippopotamus  is  not  a  table:  you'll  have  to  end  up  agreeing  that 
neither  is  a  table  a  table — it  only  seems  to  be  a  table.  Well,  that's 
what  the  hippopotamus  seems  to  be.  So  how  can  you  prove  that 
something  is  not  something  else,  when  neither  is  something  else  some 
other  thing?  There's  nothing  to  prove. 

This  is  one  of  the  profundities  that  we  advertised  in  advance. 

You  can  oppose  an  absurdity  only  with  some  other  absurdity. 
But  Science  is  established  preposterousness.    We  divide  all  intellec- 
tion: the  obviously  preposterous  and  the  established. 

But  Krakatoa:  that's  the  explanation  that  the  scientists  gave.  I 
don't  know  what  whopper  the  medicine  men  told. 

We  see,  from  the  start,  the  very  strong  inclination  of  science  to 
deny,  as  much  as  it  can,  external  relations  of  this  earth. 

This  book  is  an  assemblage  of  data  of  external  relations  of  this 
earth.  We  take  the  position  that  our  data  have  been  damned,  upon 
no  consideration  for  individual  merits  or  demerits,  but  in  conformity 
with  a  general  attempt  to  hold  out  for  isolation  of  this  earth.  This 
is  attempted  positiveness.  We  take  the  position  that  science  can  no 
more  succeed  than,  in  a  similar  endeavor,  could  the  Chinese,  or  than 
could  the  United  States.  So  then,  with  only  pseudo-consideration  of 
the  phenomena  of  1883,  or  as  an  expression  of  positivism  in  its 
aspect  of  isolation,  or  unrelatedness,  scientists  have  perpetrated  such 
an  enormity  as  suspension  of  volcanic  dust  seven  years  in  the  air — 
disregarding  the  lapse  of  several  years — rather  than  to  admit  the 
arrival  of  dust  from  somewhere  beyond  this  earth.  Not  that  scien- 
tists themselves  have  ever  achieved  positiveness,  in  its  aspect  of 
unitedness,  among  themselves — because  Nordenskiold,  before  1883, 
wrote  a  great  deal  upon  his  theory  of  cosmic  dust,  and  Prof.  Cleve- 
land Abbe  contended  against  the  Krakatoan  explanation — but  that 
this  is  the  orthodoxy  of  the  main  body  of  scientists. 

My  own  chief  reason  for  indignation  here: 

That  this  preposterous  explanation  interferes  with  some  of  my 
own  enormities. 

It  would  cost  me  too  much  explaining,  if  I  should  have  to  admit 
that  this  earth's  atmosphere  has  such  sustrining  power. 

Later,  we  shall  have  data  of  things  that  have  gone  up  in  the  air 
and  that  have  stayed  up — somewhere — weeks — months — but  not  bv 
the  sustaining  power  of  this  earth's  atmosphere.  For  instance,  tht- 
turtle  of  Vicksburg.  It  seems  to  me  that  it  would  be  ridiculous  to 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  21 

think  of  a  good-sized  turtle  hanging,  for  three  or  four  months,  upheld 
only  by  the  air,  over  the  town  of  Vicksburg.  When  it  comes  to  the 
horse  and  the  barn — I  think  that  they'll  be  classics  some  day,  but 
I  can  never  accept  that  a  horse  and  a  barn  could  float  several 
months  in  this  earth's  atmosphere. 

The  orthodox  explanation: 

See  the  Report  of  the  Krakatoa  Committee  of  the  Royal  So- 
ciety. It  comes  out  absolutely  for  the  orthodox  explanation — 
absolutely  and  beautifully,  also  expensively.  There  are  492  pages 
in  the  "Report,"  and  40  plates,  some  of  them  marvellously  colored. 
It  was  issued  after  an  investigation  that  took  five  years.  You 
couldn't  think  of  anything  done  more  efficiently,  artistically,  author- 
itatively. The  mathematical  parts  are  especially  impressive:  dis- 
tribution of  the  dust  of  Krakatoa;  velocity  of  translation  and  rates 
of  subsidence;  altitudes  and  persistences 

Annual  Register,  1883-105: 

That  the  atmospheric  effects  that  have  been  attributed  to  Kraka- 
toa were  seen  in  Trinidad  before  the  eruption  occurred ; 

Knowledge,  5-418: 

That  they  were  seen  in  Natal,  South  Africa,  six  months  before 
the  eruption. 

Inertia  and  its  inhospitality. 

Or  raw  meat  should  not  be  fed  to  babies. 

We  shall  have  a  few  data  initiatorily. 

I  fear  me  that  the  horse  and  the  barn  were  a  little  extreme  for 
our  budding  liberalities. 

The  outrageous  is  the  reasonable,  if  introduced  politely. 

Hailstones,  for  instance.  One  reads  in  the  newspapers  of  hail- 
stones the  size  of  hens'  eggs.  One  smiles.  Nevertheless  I  will  engage 
to  list  one  hundred  instances,  from  the  Monthly  Weather  Review, 
of  hailstones  the  size  of  hens'  eggs.  There  is  an  account  in  Nature, 
Nov.  i,  1894,  of  hailstones  that  weighed  almost  two  pounds  each. 
See  Chambers'  Encyclopedia  for  three-pounders.  Report  of  the 
Smithsonian  Institute,  1870-479 — two-pounders  authenticated,  and 
six-pounders  reported.  At  Seringapatam,  India,  about  the  year 
1800,  fell  a  hailstone — 

I  fear  me,  I  fear  me:  this  is  one  of  the  profoundly  damned.  I 
blurt  out  something  that  should,  perhaps,  be  withheld  for  several 
hundred  pages — but  that  damned  thing  was  the  size  of  an  elephant. 

We  laugh. 


22  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Or  snowflakes.  Size  of  saucers.  Said  to  have  fallen  at  Nashville, 
Tenn.,  Jan.  24,  1891.  One  smiles. 

"In  Montana,  in  the  winter  of  1887,  fell  snowflakes  15  inches 
across,  and  8  inches  thick."  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  1915-73.) 

In  the  topography  of  intellection,  I  should  say  that  what  we  call 
knowledge  is  ignorance  surrounded  by  laughter. 

Black  rains — red  rains — the  fall  of  a  thousand  tons  of  butter. 
Jet-black  snow — pink  snow — blue  hailstones — hailstones  flavored 
like  oranges. 
Punk  and  silk  and  charcoal. 

About  one  hundred  years  ago,  if  anyone  was  so  credulous  as  to 
think  that  stones  had  ever  fallen  from  the  sky,  he  was  reasoned 
with: 

In  the  first  place  there  are  no  stones  in  the  sky: 

Therefore  no  stones  can  fall  from  the  sky. 

Or  nothing  more  reasonable  or  scientific  or  logical  than  that  could 
be  said  upon  any  subject.  The  only  trouble  is  the  universal  trouble: 
that  the  major  premise  is  not  real,  or  is  intermediate  somewhere  be- 
tween realness  and  unrealness. 

In  1772,  a  committee,  of  whom  Lavoisier  was  a  member,  was 
appointed  by  the  French  Academy,  to  investigate  a  report  that  a 
stone  had  fallen  from  the  sky  at  Luce,  France.  Of  all  attempts  at 
positiveness,  in  its  aspect  of  isolation,  I  don't  know  of  anything 
that  has  been  fought  harder  for  than  the  notion  of  this  earth's 
unrelatedness.  Lavoisier  analyzed  the  stone  of  Luce.  The  exclu- 
sionists'  explanation  at  that  time  was  that  stones  do  not  fall  from 
the  sky:  that  luminous  objects  may  seem  to  fall,  and  that  hot 
stones  may  be  picked  up  where  a  luminous  object  seemingly  had 
landed — only  lightning  striking  a  stone,  heating,  even  melting  it. 

The  stone  of  Luce  showed  signs  of  fusion. 

Lavoisier's  analysis  "absolutely  proved"  that  this  stone  had  not 
fallen:  that  it  had  been  struck  by  lightning. 

So,  authoritatively,  falling  stones  were  damned.  The  stock 
means  of  exclusion  remained  the  explanation  of  lightning  that  was 
seen  to  strike  something — that  had  been  upon  the  ground  in  the 
first  place. 

But  positiveness  and  the  fate  of  every  positive  statement.  It  i> 
not  customary  to  think  of  damned  stones  raising  an  outcry  against 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  23 

a  sentence  of  exclusion,  but,  subjectively,  aerolites  did — or  data  of 
them  bombarded  the  walls  raised  against  them 

Monthly  Review,  1796-426: 

"The  phenomenon  which  is  the  subject  of  the  remarks  before  us 
will  seem  to  most  persons  as  little  worthy  of  credit  as  any  that 
could  be  offered.  The  falling  of  large  stones  from  the  sky,  without 
any  assignable  cause  of  their  previous  ascent,  seems  to  partake  so 
much  of  the  marvellous  as  almost  entirely  to  exclude  the  operation 
of  known  and  natural  agents.  Yet  a  body  of  evidence  is  here 
brought  to  prove  that  such  events  have  actually  taken  place,  and  we 
ought  not  to  withhold  from  it  a  proper  degree  of  attention." 

The  writer  abandons  the  first,  or  absolute,  exclusion,  and  modi- 
fies it  with  the  explanation  that  the  day  before  a  reported  fall  of 
stones  in  Tuscany,  June  16,  1794,  there  had  been  an  eruption  of 
Vesuvius 

Or  that  stones  do  fall  from  the  sky,  but  that  they  are  stones  that 
have  been  raised  to  the  sky  from  some  other  part  of  the  earth's 
surface  by  whirlwinds  or  by  volcanic  action. 

It's  more  than  one  hundred  and  twenty  years  later.  I  know  of 
no  aerolite  that  has  ever  been  acceptably  traced  to  terrestial  origin. 

Falling  stones  had  to  be  undamned — though  still  with  a  reserva- 
tion that  held  out  for  exclusion  of  outside  forces. 

One  may  have  the  knowledge  of  a  Lavoisier,  and  still  not  be  able 
to  analyze,  not  be  able  even  to  see,  except  conformably  with  the 
hypnoses,  or  the  conventional  reactions  against  hypnoses,  of  one's 
era. 

We  believe  no  more. 

We  accept. 

Little  by  little  the  whirlwind  and  volcano  explanations  had  to  be 
abandoned,  but  so  powerful  was  this  exclusion-hypnosis,  sentence  of 
damnation,  or  this  attempt  at  positiveness,  that  far  into  our  own 
times  some  scientists,  notably  Prof.  Lawrence  Smith  and  Sir  Robert 
Ball,  continued  to  hold  out  against  all  external  origins,  asserting  that 
nothing  could  fall  to  this  earth,  unless  it  had  been  cast  up  or  whirled 
up  from  some  other  part  of  this  earth's  surface. 

It's  as  commendable  as  anything  ever  has  been — by  which  I 
mean  it's  intermediate  to  the  commendable  and  the  censurable. 

It's  virginal. 

Meteorites,  data  of  which  were  once  of  the  damned,  have  been 
admitted,  but  the  common  impression  of  them  is  only  a  retreat  of 
attempted  exclusion:  that  only  two  kinds  of  substance  fall  from 


24  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

the  sky:  metallic  and  stony:  that  the  metallic  objects  are  of  iron 
and  nickel 

Butter  and  paper  and  wool  and  silk  and  resin. 

We  see,  to  start  with,  that  the  virgins  of  science  have  fought  and 
wept  and  screamed  against  external  relations — upon  two  grounds: 

There  in  the  first  place; 

Or  up  from  one  part  of  this  earth's  surface  and  down  to  another. 

At  late  as  November,  1902,  in  Nature  Notes,  13-231,  a  member 
of  the  Selborne  Society  still  argued  that  meteorites  do  not  fall 
from  the  sky;  that  they  are  masses  of  iron  upon  the  ground  "in  the 
first  place,"  that  attract  lightning;  that  the  lightning  is  seen,  and  is 
mistaken  for  a  falling,  luminous  object 

By  progress  we  mean  rape. 

Butter  and  beef  and  blood  and  a  stone  with  strange  inscriptions 
upon  it. 


CHAPTER  III 

SO  then  it  is  our  expression  that  Science  relates  to  real  knowl- 
edge no  more  than  does  the  growth  of  a  plant,  or  the  organiza- 
tion of  a  department  store,  or  the  development  of  a  nation:  that 
all  are  assimilative,  or  organizing,  or  systematizing  processes  that 
represent  different  attempts  to  attain  the  positive  state — the  state 
commonly  called  heaven,  I  suppose  I  mean. 

There  can  be  no  real  science  where  there  are  indeterminate 
variables,  but  every  variable  is,  in  finer  terms,  indeterminate,  or 
irregular,  if  only  to  have  the  appearance  of  being  in  Intermediate- 
ness  is  to  express  regularity  unattained.  The  invariable,  or  the 
real  and  stable,  would  be  nothing  at  all  in  Intermediateness — 
rather  as,  but  in  relative  terms,  an  undistorted  interpretation  of 
external  sounds  in  the  mind  of  a  dreamer  could  not  continue  to 
exist  in  a  dreaming  mind,  because  that  touch  of  relative  realness 
would  be  of  awakening  and  not  of  dreaming.  Science  is  the  at- 
tempt to  awaken  to  realness,  wherein  it  is  attempt  to  find  regularity 
and  uniformity.  Or  the  regular  and  uniform  would  be  that  which 
has  nothing  external  to  disturb  it.  By  the  universal  we  mean  the 
real.  Or  the  notion  is  that  the  underlying  super-attempt,  as  ex- 
pressed in  Science,  is  indifferent  to  the  subject-matter  of  Science: 
that  the  attempt  to  regularize  is  the  vital  spirit.  Bugs  and  stars 
and  chemical  messes:  that  they  are  only  quasi-real,  and  that  of 
them  there  is  nothing  real  to  know;  but  that  systematization  of 
pseudo-data  is  approximation  to  realness  or  final  awakening 

Or  a  dreaming  mind — and  its  centaurs  and  canary  birds  that 
turn  into  giraffes — there  could  be  no  real  biology  upon  such  sub- 
jects, but  attempt,  in  a  dreaming  mind,  to  systematize  such  ap- 
pearances would  be  movement  toward  awakening — if  better  mental 
co-ordination  is  all  that  we  mean  by  the  state  of  being  awake — 
relatively  awake. 

So  it  is,  that  having  attempted  to  systematize,  by  ignoring  ex- 
ternality to  the  greatest  possible  degree,  the  notion  of  things 
dropping  in  upon  this  earth,  from  externality,  is  as  unsettling  and 
as  unwelcome  to  Science  as — tin  horns  blowing  in  upon  a  musician's 


26  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

relatively  symmetric  composition — flies  alighting  upon  a  painter's 
attempted  harmony,  and  tracking  colors  one  into  another — suffrag- 
ist getting  up  and  making  a  political  speech  at  a  prayer  meeting. 

If  all  things  are  of  a  oneness,  which  is  a  state  intermediate  to 
unrealness  and  realness,  and  if  nothing  has  succeeded  in  breaking 
away  and  establishing  entity  for  itself,  and  could  not  continue  to 
"exist"  in  intermediateness,  if  it  should  succeed,  any  more  than 
could  the  bora  still  at  the  same  time  be  the  uterine,  I  of  course 
know  of  no  positive  difference  between  Science  and  Christian  Science 
— and  the  attitude  of  both  toward  the  unwelcome  is  the  same — "it 
does  not  exist." 

A  Lord  Kelvin  and  a  Mrs.  Eddy,  and  something  not  to  their  lik- 
ing— it  does  not  exist. 

Of  course  not,  we  Intermediates  say:  but,  also,  that,  in  Inter- 
mediateness,  neither  is  there  absolute  non-existence. 

Or  a  Christian  Scientist  and  a  toothache — neither  exists  in  the 
final  sense:  also  neither  is  absolutely  non-existent,  and,  according 
to  our  therapeutics,  the  one  that  more  highly  approximates  to 
realness  will  win. 

A  secret  of  power • 

I  think  it's  another  profundity. 

Do  you  want  power  over  something? 

Be  more  nearly  real  than  it. 

We'll  begin  with  yellow  substances  that  have  fallen  upon  this 
earth:  we'll  see  whether  our  data  of  them  have  a  higher  approxi- 
mation to  realness  than  have  the  dogmas  of  those  who  deny  their 
existence — that  is,  as  products  from  somewhere  external  to  this 
earth. 

In  mere  impressionism  we  take  our  stand.  We  have  no  positive 
tests  nor  standards.  Realism  in  art:  realism  in  science — they  pass 
away.  In  1859,  tne  thing  to  do  was  to  accept  Darwinism;  now 
many  biologists  are  revolting  and  trying  to  conceive  of  something 
else.  The  thing  to  do  was  to  accept  it  in  its  day,  but  Darwinism 
of  course  was  never  proved: 

The  fittest  survive. 

What  is  meant  by  the  fittest? 

Not  the  strongest ;  not  .the  cleverest 

Weakness  and  stupidity  everywhere  survive. 

There  is  no  way  of  determining  fitness  except  in  that  a  thing 
does  survive. 

"Fitness,"  then,  is  only  another  name  for  "survival." 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  27 

Darwinism  i 

That  survivors  survive. 

Although  Darwinism,  then,  seems  positively  baseless,  or  abso- 
lutely irrational,  its  massing  of  supposed  data,  and  its  attempted 
coherence  approximate  more  highly  to  Organization  and  Consistency 
than  did  the  inchoate  speculations  that  preceded  it. 

Or  that  Columbus  never  proved  that  the  earth  is  round. 

Shadow  of  the  earth  on  the  moon? 

No  one  has  ever  seen  it  in  its  entirety.  The  earth's  shadow  is 
much  larger  than  the  moon.  If  the  periphery  of  the  shadow  is 
curved — but  the  convex  moon — a  straight-edged  object  will  cast  a 
curved  shadow  upon  a  surface  that  is  convex. 

All  the  other  so-called  proofs  may  be  taken  up  in  the  same  way. 
It  was  impossible  for  Columbus  to  prove  that  the  earth  is  round. 
It  was  not  required:  only  that  with  a  higher  seeming  of  positiveness 
than  that  of  his  opponents,  he  should  attempt.  The  thing  to  do, 
in  1492,  was  nevertheless  to  accept  that  beyond  Europe,  to  the 
west,  were  other  lands. 

I  offer  for  acceptance,  as  something  concordant  with  the  spirit 
of  this  first  quarter  of  the  2oth  century,  the  expression  that  beyond 
this  earth  are — other  lands — from  which  come  things  as,  from 
America,  float  things  to  Europe. 

As  to  yellow  substances  that  have  fallen  upon  this  earth,  the 
endeavor  to  exclude  extra-mundane  origins  is  the  dogma  that  all 
yellow  rains  and  yellow  snows  are  colored  with  pollen  from  this 
earth's  pine  trees.  Symons'  Meteorological  Magazine  is  especially 
prudish  in  this  respect  and  regards  as  highly  improper  all  advances 
made  by  other  explainers. 

Nevertheless,  the  Monthly  Weather  Review,  May,  1877,  reports  a 
golden-yellow  fall,  of  Feb.  27,  1877,  at  Peckloh,  Germany,  in  which 
four  kinds  of  organisms,  not  pollen,  were  the  coloring  matter.  There 
were  minute  things  shaped  like  arrows,  coffee  beans,  horns,  and 
disks. 

They  may  have  been  symbols.  They  may  have  been  objective 
hieroglyphics — 

Mere  passing  fancy — let  it  go 

In  the  Annales  de  Chimie,  85-288,  there  is  a  list  of  rains  said 
to  have  contained  sulphur.  I  have  thirty  or  forty  other  notes. 
I'll  not  use  one  of  them.  I'll  admit  that  every  one  of  them  is  upon 
a  fall  of  pollen.  I  said,  to  begin  with,  that  our  methods  would  be 
the  methods  of  theologians  and  scientists,  and  they  always  begin 


28  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

whli  an  appearance  of  liberality.  I  grant  thirty  or  forty  points  to 
3tart  with.  I'm  as  liberal  as  any  of  them — or  that  my  liberality 
won't  cost  me  anything — the  enormousness  of  the  data  that  we 
shall  have.  ' 

Or  just  to  look  over  a  typical  instance  of  this  dogma,  and  the 
way  it  works  out: 

In  the  American  Journal  of  Science,  1-42-196,  we  are  told  of  a 
yellow  substance  that  fell  by  the  bucketful  upon  a  vessel,  one 
"windless"  night  in  June,  in  Pictou  Harbor,  Nova  Scotia.  The 
writer  analyzed  the  substance,  and  it  was  found  to  "give  off  nitro- 
gen and  ammonia  and  an  animal  odor." 

Now,  one  of  our  Intermediatist  principles,  to  start  with,  is  that 
so  far  from  positive,  in  the  aspect  of  Hcmogeneousness,  are  all 
substances,  that,  at  least  in  what  is  called  an  elementary  sense, 
anything  can  be  found  anywhere.  Mahogany  logs  on  the  coast  of 
Greenland;  bugs  of  a  valley  on  the  top  of  Mt.  Blanc;  atheists  at  a 
prayer  meeting;  ice  in  India.  For  instance,  chemical  analysis  can 
reveal  that  almost  any  dead  man  was  poisoned  with  arsenic,  we'll 
say,  because  there  is  no  stomach  without  some  iron,  lead,  tin,  gold, 
arsenic  in  it  and  of  it — which,  of  course,  in  a  broader  sense,  doesn't 
matter  much,  because  a  certain  number  of  persons  must,  as  a  re- 
straining influence,  be  executed 'for  murder  every  year;  and,  if 
detectives  aren't  able  really  to  detect  anything,  illusion  of  their 
success  is  all  that  is  necessary,  and  it  is  very  honorable  to  give  up 
one's  life  for  society  as  a  whole. 

The  chemist  who  analyzed  the  substance  of  Pictou  sent  a  sample 
to  the  Editor  of  the  Journal.  The  Editor  of  course  found  pollen 
in  it. 

My  own  acceptance  is  that  there'd  have  to  be  some  pollen  in  it: 
that  nothing  could  very  well  fall  through  the  air,  in  June,  near  the 
pine  forests  of  Nova  Scotia,  and  escape  all  floating  spores  of  pollen. 
But  the  Editor  does  not  say  that  this  substance  "contained"  pollen. 
He  disregards  "nitrogen,  ammonia,  and  an  animal  odor,"  and  says 
that  the  substance  was  pollen.  For  the  sake  of  our  thirty  or 
forty  tokens  of  liberality,  or  pseudo-liberality,  if  we  can't  be  really 
liberal,  we  grant  that  the  chemist  of  the  first  examination  probably 
wouldn't  know  an  animal  odor  if  he  were  janitor  of  a  menagerie. 
As  we  go  along,  however,  there  can  be  no  such  sweeping  ignoring 
of  this  phenomenon: 

The  fall  of  animal-matter  from  the  sky. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  2  > 

I'd  suggest,  to  start  with,  that  we'd  put  ourselves  in  the  place  of 
deep-sea  fishes: 

How  would  they  account  for  the  fall  of  animal-matter  from 
above? 

They  wouldn't  try 

Or  it's  easy  enough  to  think  of  most  of  us  as  deep-sea  fishes  of 
a  kind. 

Jour.  Franklin  Inst.,  90-11: 

That,  upon  the  i4th  of  February,  1870,  there  fell,  at  Genoa, 
Italy,  according  to  Director  Boccardo,  of  the  Technical  Institute  of 
Genoa,  and  Prof.  Castellani,  a  yellow  substance.  But  the  micro- 
scope revealed  numerous  globules  of  cobalt  blue,  also  corpuscles  of 
a  pearly  color  that  resembled  starch.  See  Nature,  2-166. 

Comptes  Rendus,  56-972: 

M.  Bouis  says  of  a  substance,  reddish  varying  to  yellowish,  that 
fell  enormously  and  successively,  or  upon  April  30,  May  i  and  May 
2,  in  France  and  Spain,  that  it  carbonized  and  spread  the  odor  of 
charred  animal  matter — that  it  was  not  pollen — that  in  alcohol  it 
left  a  residue  of  resinous  matter. 

Hundreds  of  thousands  of  tons  of  this  matter  must  have  fallen. 

"Odor  of  charred  animal  matter." 

Or  an  aerial  battle  that  occurred  in  inter-planetary  space  several 
hundred  years  ago — effect  of  time  in  making  diverse  remains  uni- 
form in  appearance 

It's  all  very  absurd  because,  even  though  we  are  told  of  a  pro- 
digious quantity  of  animal  matter  that  fell  from  the  sky — three 
days — France  and  Spain — we're  not  ready  yet:  that's  all.  M.  Bouis 
says  that  this  substance  was  not  pollen;  the  vastness  of  the  fall 
makes  acceptable  that  it  was  not  pollen;  still,  the  resinous  residue 
does  suggest  pollen  of  pine  trees.  We  shall  hear  a  great  deal  of  a 
substance  with  a  resinous  residue  that  has  fallen  from  the  sky: 
finally  we  shall  divorce  it  from  all  suggestion  of  pollen. 

Blackwood's  Magazine,  3-338: 

A  yellow  powder  that  fell  at  Gerace,  Calabria,  March  14,  1813. 
Some  of  this  substance  was  collected  by  Sig.  Simenini,  Professor  of 
Chemistry,  at  Naples.  It  had  an  earthy,  insipid  taste,  and  is  des- 
cribed as  "unctuous."  When  heated,  this  matter  turned  brown, 
then  black,  then  red.  According  to  the  Annals  of  Philosophy, 
11-466,  one  of  the  components  was  a  greenish-yellow  substance, 
which,  when  dried,  was  found  to  be  resinous. 

But  concomitants  of  this  fall: 


30  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Loud  noises  were  heard  in  the  sky. 

Stones  fell  from  the  sky. 

According  to  Chladni,  these  concomitants  occurred,  and  to  me 
they  seem — rather  brutal? — or  not  associable  with  something  so 
soft  and  gentle  as  a  fall  of  pollen? 

Black  rains  and  black  snows — rains  as  black  as  a  deluge  of  ink 
— jet-black  snowflakes. 

Such  a  rain  as  that  which  fell  in  Ireland,  May  14,  1849,  described 
in  the  Annals  of  Scientific  Discovery,  1850,  and  the  Annual  Register, 
1849.  It  fell  upon  a  district  of  400  square  miles,  and  was  the  color 
of  ink,  and  of  a  fetid  odor  and  very  disagreeable  taste. 

The  rain  at  Castlecommon,  Ireland,  April  30,  1887 — "thick,  black 
ram."  (Amer.  Met.  Jour.,  4-193.) 

A  black  rain  fell  in  Ireland,  Oct.  8  and  9,  1907.  (Symons'  Met. 
Mag.  43-2.)  "It  left  a  most  peculiar  and  disagreeable  smell  in 
the  air." 

The  orthodox  explanation  of  this  rain  occurs  in  Nature,  March 
2,  1908 — cloud  of  soot  that  had  come  from  South  Wales,  crossing 
the  Irish  Channel  and  all  of  Ireland. 

So  the  black  rain  of  Ireland,  of  March,  1898:  ascribed  in  Symons' 
Met.  Mag.  33-40,  to  clouds  of  soot  from  the  manufacturing  towns 
of  North  England  and  South  Scotland. 

Our  Intermediatist  principle  of  pseudo-logic,  or  our  principle  of 
Continuity  is,  of  course,  that  nothing  is  unique,  or  individual:  that 
all  phenomena  merge  away  into  all  other  phenomena:  that,  for 
instance — suppose  there  should  be  vast  celestial  super-oceanic,  or 
inter-planetary  vessels  that  come  near  this  earth  and  discharge 
volumes  of  smoke  at  times.  We're  only  supposing  such  a  thing  as 
that  now,  because,  conventionally,  we  are  beginning  modestly  and 
tentatively.  But  if  it  were  so,  there  would  necessarily  be  some  phe- 
nomenon upon  this  earth,  with  which  that  phenomenon  would  merge. 
Extra-mundane  smoke  and  smoke  from  cities  merge,  or  both  would 
manifest  in  black  precipitations  in  rain. 

In  Continuity,  it  is  impossible  to  distinguish  phenomena  at  their 
merging-points,  so  we  look  for  them  at  their  extremes.  Impossible 
to  distinguish  between  animal  and  vegetable  in  some  infusoria — but 
hippopotamus  and  violet.  For  all  practical  purposes  they're  distin- 
guishable enough.  No  one  but  a  Barnum  or  a  Bailey  would  send 
one  a  bunch  of  hippopotami  as  a  token  of  regard. 

So  away  from  the  great  manufacturing  centers: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  31 

Black  rain  in  Switzerland,  Jan.  20,  1911.  Switzerland  is  so  re- 
mote, and  so  ill  at  ease  is  the  conventional  explanation  here,  that 
Nature,  85-451,  says  of  this  rain  that  in  certain  conditions  of 
weather,  snow  may  take  on  an  appearance  of  blackness  that  is  quite 
deceptive. 

May  be  so.  Or  at  night,  if  dark  enough,  snow  may  look  black. 
This  is  simply  denying  that  a  black  rain  fell  in  Switzerland,  Jan. 
20,  1911. 

Extreme  remoteness  from  great  manufacturing  centers: 

La  Nature,  1888,  2-406: 

That  Aug.  14,  1888,  there  fell  at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  a  rain 
so  black  as  to  be  described  as  a  "shower  of  ink." 

Continuity  dogs  us.  Continuity  rules  us  and  pulls  us  back.  We 
seemed  to  have  a  little  hope  that  by  the  method  of  extremes  we 
could  get  away  from  things  that  merge  indistinguishably  into  other 
things.  We  find  that  every  departure  from  one  merger  is  entrance 
upon  another.  At  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  vast  volumes  of  smoke 
from  great  manufacturing  centers,  as  an  explanation,  can  not  very 
acceptably  merge  with  the  explanation  of  extra-mundane  origin — 
but  smoke  from  a  terrestial  volcano  can,  and  that  is  the  suggestion 
that  is  made  in  La  Nature. 

There  is,  in  human  intellection,  no  real  standard  to  judge  by, 
but  our  acceptance,  for  the  present,  is  that  the  more  nearly  positive 
will  prevail.  By  the  more  nearly  positive  we  mean  the  more 
nearly  Organized.  Everything  merges  away  into  everything  else, 
but  proportionately  to  its  complexity,  if  unified,  a  thing  seems 
strong,  real,  and  distinct:  so,  in  aesthetics,  it  is  recognized  that 
diversity  in  unity  is  higher  beauty,  or  approximation  to  Beauty, 
than  is  simpler  unity;  so  the  logicians  feel  that  agreement  of  diverse 
data  constitute  greater  convincingness,  or  strength,  than  that  of 
mere  parallel  instances:  so  to  Herbert  Spencer  the  more  highly 
differentiated  and  integrated  is  the  more  fully  evolved.  Our  oppon- 
ents hold  out  for  mundane  origin  of  all  black  rains.  Our  method 
will  be  the  presenting  of  diverse  phenomena  in  agreement  with  the 
notion  of  some  other  origin.  We  take  up  not  only  black  rains  but 
black  rains  and  their  accompanying  phenomena. 

A  correspondent  to  Knowledge,  5-190,  writes  of  a  black  rain 
that  fell  in  the  Clyde  Valley,  March  i,  1884:  of  another  black  rain 
that  fell  two  days  later.  'According  to  the  correspondent,  a  bhck  rain 
had  fallen  in  the  Clyde  Valley,  March  20,  1828:  then  again  March 
22,  1828.  According  to  Nature,  9-43,  a.  black  rain  fell  at  Marls- 


(a  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

oni,  England,  Sept.  4,  1873;  more  than  twenty-four  hours  later 
nuther  black  rain  fell  in  the  same  small  town. 

The  black  rains  of  Slains: 

According  to  Rev.  James  Rust  (Scottish  Showers) : 

A  black  rain  at  Slains,  Jan.  14,  1862 — another  at  Carluke,  ^40 
miles  from  Slains,  May  i,  1862 — at  Slains,  May  20,  1862 — Slains, 
Oct.  28,  1863. 

But  after  two  of  these  showers,  vast  quantities  of  a  substance 
described  sometimes  as  "pumice  stone,"  but  sometimes  as  "slag," 
were  washed  upon  the  sea  coast  near  Slains.  A  chemist's  opinion  is 
given  that  this  substance  was  slag:  that  it  was  not  a  volcanic  prod- 
uct: slag  from  smelting  works.  We  now  have,  for  black  rains,  a 
concomitant  that  is  irreconcilable  with  origin  from  factory  chinv 
neys.  Whatever  it  may  have  been  the  quantity  of  this  substance 
tfas  so  enormous  that,  in  Mr.  Rust's  opinion,  to  have  produced  so 
much  of  it  would  have  required  the  united  output  of  all  the  smelting 
works  in  the  world.  If  slag  it  were,  we  accept  that  an  artificial 
product  has,  in  enormous  quantities,  fallen  from  the  sky.  If  you 
don't  think  that  such  occurrences  are  damned  by  Science,  read 
Scottish  Shvwers  and  see  how  impossible  it  was  for  the  author  to 
have  this  matter  taken  up  by  the  scientific  world. 

The  first  and  second  rains  corresponded,  in  time,  with  ordinary 
ebullitions  of  Vesuvius. 

The  third  and  fourth,  according  to  Mr.  Rust,  corresponded  with 
no  known  volcanic  activities  upon  this  earth. 

La  Science  Pour  Tons,  11-26: 

That,  between  October,  1863,  and  January,  1866,  four  more 
black  rains  fell  at  Slains,  Scotland. 

The  writer  of  this  supplementary  account  tells  us,  w'th  a  better, 
or  more  unscrupulous,  orthodoxy  than  Mr.  Rust's,  that  of  the  eight 
black  rains,  five  coincided  with  eruptions  of  Vesuvius  and  three 
with  eruptions  of  Etna. 

The  fate  of  all  explanation  is  to  close  one  door  only  to  have 
another  fly  wide  open.  I  should  say  that  my  own  notions  upon 
this  subject  will  be  considered  irrational,  but  at  least  my  gregarious- 
ness  is  satisfied  in  associating  here  with  the  preposterous — or  this 
writer,  and  those  who  think  in  his  rut,  have  to  say  that  they  can 
ihmk  of  four  discharges  from  one  far-distant  volcano,  passing  over 
a  great  part  of  Europe,  precipitating  nowhere  else,  discharging  pre- 
cisely over  one  small  northern  parish 

But  also  of  three  other  discharges,  from  another  far-distant  vol- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  34 

cano,  showing  the  same  precise  preference,  if  not  marksmanship,  for 
one  small  parish  in  Scotland. 

Nor  would  orthodoxy  be  any  better  off  in  thinking  of  exploding 
meteorites  and  their  debris:  preciseness  and  recurrence  would  be 
just  as  difficult  to  explain. 

My  own  notion  is  of  an  island  near  an  oceanic  trade-route:  it 
might  receive  debris  from  passing  vessels  seven  times  in  four 
years. 

Other  concomitants  of  black  rains: 

In  Timb's  Year  Book,  1851-270,  there  is  an  account  of  "a  sort 
of  rumbling,  as  of  wagons,  heard  for  upward  of  an  hour  without 
ceasing,"  July  16,  1850,  Bulwick  Rectory,  Northampton,  England. 
On  the  1 9th,  a  black  rain  fell. 

In  Nature,  30-6,  a  correspondent  writes  of  an  intense  darkness 
at  Preston,  England,  April  26,  1884:  page  32,  another  correspondent 
writes  of  black  rain  at  Crowle,  near  Worcester,  April  26:  that  a 
week  later,  or  May  3,  it  had  fallen  again:  another  account  of  black 
rain,  upon  the  28th  of  April,  near  Church  Shetton,  so  intense  that 
the  following  day  brooks  were  still  dyed  with  it.  According  to 
four  accounts  by  correspondents  to  Nature  there  were  earth- 
quakes in  England  at  this  time. 

Or  the  black  rain  of  Canada,  Nov.  9,  1819.  This  time  it  is 
orthodoxy  to  attribute  the  black  precipitate  to  smoke  of  forest  fires 
south  of  the  Ohio  River 

Zurcher,  Meteors,  p.  238: 

That  this  black  rain  was  accompanied  by  "shocks  like  those  of 
an  earthquake." 

Edinburgh  Philosophical  Journal,  2-381: 

That  the  earthquake  had  occurred  at  the  climax  of  intense  dark- 
ness and  the  fall  of  black  rain. 

Red  rains. 

Orthodoxy: 

Sand  blown  by  the  sirocco,  from  the  Sahara  to  Europe. 

Especially  in  the  earthquake  regions  of  Europe,  there  have  been 
many  falls  of  red  substance,  usually,  but  not  always,  precipitated 
in  rain.  Upon  many  occasions,  these  substances  have  been  "abso- 
lutely identified"  as  sand  from  the  Sahara.  When  I  first  took  this 
matter  up,  I  came  across  assurance  after  assurance,  so  positive  to 
this  effect,  that,  had  I  not  been  an  Intennediatist,  I'd  have  looked 
n  »  further.  Samples  collected  from  a  rain  at  Genoa — samples  of 


34  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED    . 

sand  forwarded  from  the  Sahara — "absolute  agreement"  some  writers 
said:  same  color,  same  particles  of  quartz,  even  the  same  shells  of 
diatoms  mixed  in.  Then  the  chemical  analyses:  not  a  disagreement 
worth  mentioning. 

Our  intermediatist  means  of  expression  will  be  that,  with  proper 
exclusions,  after  the  scientific  or  theological  method,  anything  can 
be  identified  with  anything  else,  if  all  things  are  only  different  ex- 
pressions of  an  underlying  oneness. 

To  many  minds  there's  rest  and  there's  satisfaction  in  that  ex- 
pression, "absolutely  identified."  Absoluteness,  or  the  illusion  of  it 
— the  universal  quest.  If  chemists  have  identified  substances  that 
have  fallen  in  Europe  as  sand  from  African  deserts,  swept  up  in 
African  whirlwinds,  that's  assuasive  to  all  the  irritations  that  occur 
to  those  cloistered  minds  that  must  repose  in  the  concept  of  a  snug, 
isolated,  little  world,  free  from  contact  with  cosmic  wickednesses, 
safe  from  stellar  guile,  undisturbed  by  inter-planetary  prowlings  and 
invasions.  The  only  trouble  is  that  a  chemist's  analysis,  which 
seems  so  final  and  authoritative  to  some  minds,  is  no  more  nearly 
absolute  than  is  identification  by  a  child  or  description  by  an  im- 
becile  

I  take  some  of  that  back:  I  accept  that  the  approximation  is 
higher 

But  that  it's  based  upon  delusion,  because  there  is  no  definiteness, 
no  homogeneity,  no  stability,  only  different  stages  somewhere  be- 
tween them  and  indefiniteness,  heterogeneity,  and  instability.  There 
are  no  chemical  elements.  It  seems  acceptable  that  Ramsay  and 
others  have  settled  that.  The  chemical  elements  are  only  another 
disappointment  in  the  quest  for  the  positive,  as  the  definite,  the 
homogeneous,  and  the  stable.  If  there  were  real  elements,  there 
could  be  a  real  science  of  chemistry. 

Upon  Nov.  12  and  13,  1902,  occurred  the  greatest  fall  of  matter 
in  the  history  of  Australia.  Upon  the  i4th  of  November,  it  "rained 
mud,"  in  Tasmania.  It  was  of  course  attributed  to  Australian 
whirlwinds,  but,  according  to  the  Monthly  Weather  Review,  32- 
365,  there  was  a  haze  all  the  way  to  the  Philippines,  also  as  far  as 
Hong  Kong.  It  may  be  that  this  phenomenon  had  no  especial  rela- 
tion with  the  even  more  tremendous  fall  of  matter  that  occurred  in 
Europe,  February,  1903. 

For  several  days,  the  south  of  England  was  a  dumping  ground — 
from  somewhere. 

If  you'd  like  to  have  a  chemist's  opinion,  even  though  it's  only 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  35 

a  chemist's  opinion,  see  the  report  of  the  meeting  of  the  Royal 
Chemical  Society,  April  2,  1903.  Mr.  E.  G.  Clayton  read  a  paper 
upon  some  of  the  substance  that  had  fallen  from  the  sky,  collected 
by  him.  The  Sahara  explanation  applies  mostly  to  falls  that  occur 
in  southern  Europe.  Farther  away,  the  conventionalists  are  a  little 
uneasy:  for  instance,  the  editor  of  the  Monthly  Weather  Review, 
29-121,  says  of  a  red  rain  that  fell  near  the  coast  of  Newfoundland, 
early  in  1890:  "It  would  be  very  remarkable  if  this  was  Sahara 
dust."  Mr.  Clayton  said  that  the  matter  examined  by  him  was 
"merely  wind-borne  dust  from  the  roads  and  lanes  of  Wessex."  This 
opinion  is  typical  of  all  scientific  opinion — or  theological  opinion — 
or  feminine  opinion — all  very  well  except  for  what  it  disregards. 
The  most  charitable  thing  I  can  think  of — because  I  think  it  gives 
us  a  broader  tone  to  relieve  our  malices  with  occasional  charities — 
is  that  Mr.  Clayton  had  not  heard  of  the  astonishing  extent  of  this 
fall — had  covered  the  Canary  Islands,  on  the  i9th,  for  instance. 
I  think,  myself,  that  in  1903,  we  passed  through  the  remains  of  a 
powdered  world — left  over  from  an  ancient  inter-planetary  dispute, 
brooding  in  space  like  a  red  resentment  ever  since.  Or,  like  every 
other  opinion,  the  notion  of  dust  from  Wessex  turns  into  a  provin- 
cial thing  when  we  look  it  over. 

To  think  is  to  conceive  incompletely,  because  all  thought  relates 
only  to  the  local.  We  metaphysicians,  of  course,  like  to  have  the 
notion  that  we  think  of  the  unthinkable. 

As  to  opinions,  or  pronouncements,  I  should  say,  because  they 
always  have  such  an  authoritative  air,  of  other  chemists,  there  is 
an  analysis  in  Nature,  68-54,  giving  water  and  organic  matter 
at  9.08  per  cent.  It's  that  carrying  out  of  fractions  that's  so  con- 
vincing. The  substance  is  identified  as  sand  from  the  Sahara. 

The  vastness  of  this  fall.  In  Nature,  68-65,  we  are  told  that 
it  had  occurred  in  Ireland,  too.  The  Sahara,  of  course — because, 
prior  to  Feb.  19,  there  had  been  dust  storms  in  the  Sahara — disre- 
garding that  in  that  great  region  there's  always,  in  some  part  of  it, 
a  dust  storm.  However,  just  at  present,  it  does  look  reasonable  that 
dust  had  come  from  Africa,  via  the  Canaries. 

The  great  difficulty  that  authoritativeness  has  to  contend  with  is 
some  other  authoritativeness.  When  an  infallibility  clashes  with  a 
pontification 

They  explain. 

Nature,  March  5,  1903: 

Another  analysis — 36  per  cent  organic  matter. 


;?<S  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Such  disagreements  don't  look  very  well,  so,  in  Nature,  68-109, 
one  of  the  differing  chemists  explains.  He  says  that  his  analysis 
was  of  muddy  rain,  and  the  other  was  of  sediment  of  rain 

We're  quite  ready  to  accept  excuses  from  the  most  high,  though 
I  do  wonder  whether  we're  quite  so  damned  as  we  were,  if  we  find 
ourselves  in  a  gracious  and  tolerant  mood  toward  the  powers  that 
condemn — but  the  tax  that  now  comes  upon  our  good  manners  and 
unwillingness  to  be  too  severe . 

Nature,  68-223: 

Another  chemist.  He  says  it  was  23.49  per  cent  water  and  or- 
ganic matter. 

He  "identifies"  this  matter  as  sand  from  an  African  desert — but 
after  deducting  organic  matter 

But  you  and  I  could  be  "identified"  as  sand  from  an  African  des- 
ert, after  deducting  all  there  is  to  us  except  sand 

Why  we  can  not  accept  that  this  fall  was  of  sand  from  the 
Sahara,  omitting  the  obvious  objection  that  in  most  parts  the  Sahara 
is  not  red  at  all,  but  is  usually  described  as  "dazzling  white" 

The  enormousness  of  it:  that  a  whirlwind  might  have  carried  it, 
but  that,  in  that  case  it  would  be  no  supposititious,  or  doubtfully 
identified  whirlwind,  but  the  greatest  atmospheric  cataclysm  in  the 
history  of  this  earth: 

Jour.  Roy.  Met.  Soc.,  30-56: 

That,  up  to  the  27th  of  February,  this  fall  had  continued  in 
Belgium,  Holland,  Germany  and  Austria;  that  in  some  instances  it 
was  not  sand,  or  that  almost  all  the  matter  was  organic:  that  a 
vessel  had  reported  the  fall  as  occurring  in  the  Atlantic  Ocean, 
midway  between  Southampton  and  the  Barbados.  The  calculation 
is  given  that,  in  England  alone,  10,000,000  tons  of  matter  had 
fallen.  It  had  fallen  in  Switzerland  (Symons'  Met.  Mag.,  March, 
1903).  It  had  fallen  in  Russia  (Bull.  Com.  Geolog.,  22-48).  Not 
only  had  a  vast  quantity  of  matter  fallen  several  months  before,  in 
Australia,  but  it  was  at  this  time  falling  in  Australia  (Victorian 
Naturalist,  June,  1903) — enormously — red  mud — fifty  tons  per 
square  mile. 

The  Wessex  explanation 

Or  that  every  explanation  is  a  Wessex  explanation:  by  that  I 
mean  an  attempt  to  interpret  the  enormous  in  terms  of  the  minute 
— but  that  nothing  can  be  finally  explained,  because  by  Truth  we 
mean  the  Universal;  and  that  even  if  we  could  think  as  wide  as 
Universality,  that  would  not  be  requital  to  the  cosmic  quest — whir' 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  37 

is  not  for  Truth,  but  for  the  local  that  is  true — not  to  universalize 
the  local  but  to  localize  the  universal — or  to  give  to  a  cosmic  cloud 
absolute  interpretation  in  terms  of  the  little  dusty  roads  and  lanes 
of  Wessex.  I  can  not  conceive  that  this  can  be  done:  I  think  of 
high  approximation. 

Our  Intermediatist  concept  is  that,  because  of  the  continuity  of 
all  "things,"  which  are  not  separate,  positive,  or  real  things,  all 
pseudo-things  partake  of  the  underlying,  or  are  only  different  ex- 
pressions, degrees,  or  aspects  of  the  underlying:  so  then  that  a  sample 
from  somewhere  in  anything  must  correspond  with  a  sample  from 
somewhere  in  anything  else. 

That,  by  due  care  in  selection,  and  disregard  for  everything  else, 
or  the  scientific  and  theological  method,  the  substance  that  fell,  Feb- 
ruary, 1903,  could  be  identified  with  anything,  or  with  some  part 
or  aspect  of  anything  that  could  be  conceived  of 

With  sand  from  the  Sahara,  sand  from  a  barrel  of  sugar,  or  dust 
of  your  great,  great  grandfather. 

Different  samples  are  described  and  listed  hi  the  Journal  of  the 
Royal  Meteorological  Society,  30-57 — or  we'll  see  whether  my  notion 
that  a  chemist  could  have  identified  some  one  of  these  samples  as 
from  anywhere  conceivable,  is  extreme  or  not: 

"Similar  to  brick  dust,"  in  one  place;  "buff  or  light  brown,*  in 
another  place;  "chocolate-colored  and  silky  to  the  touch  and  slightly 
iridescent";  "gray";  "red-rust  color";  "reddish  raindrops  and  gray 
sand";  "dirty  gray";  "quite  red";  "yellow-brown,  with  a  tinge  of 
pink";  "deep  yellow-clay  color." 

In  Nature,  it  is  described  as  of  a  peculiar  yellowish  cast  in 
one  place,  reddish  somewhere  else,  and  salmon-colored  in  another 
place. 

Or  there  could  be  real  science  if  there  were  really  anything  to  be 
scientific  about. 

Or  the  science  of  chemistry  is  like  a  science  of  sociology,  preju- 
diced in  advance,  because  only  to  see  is  to  see  with  a  prejudice, 
setting  out  to  "prove"  that  all  inhabitants  of  New  York  came  from 
Africa. 

Very  easy  matter.  Samples  from  one  part  of  town.  Disregard 
for  all  the  rest. 

There  is  no  science  but  Wessex-science. 

According  to  our  acceptance,  there  should  be  no  other,  but  that 
approximation  should  be  higher:  that  metaphysics  is  super-evil:  that 
the  scientific  spirit  is  of  the  cosmic  quest. 


38  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Our  notion  is  that,  in  a  real  existence,  such  a  quasi-system  of 
fables  as  the  science  of  chemistry  could  not  deceive  for  a  moment: 
but  that  in  an  "existence"  endeavoring  to  become  real,  it  represents 
that  endeavor,  and  will  continue  to  impose  its  pseudo-positiveness 
until  it  be  driven  out  by  a  higher  approximation  to  realness; 

That  the  science  of  chemistry  is  as  impositive  as  fortune-telling — 

Or  no 

That,  though  it  represents  a  higher  approximation  to  realness 
than  does  alchemy,  for  instance,  and  so  drove  out  alchemy,  it  is 
still  only  somewhere  between  myth  and  positiveness. 

The  attempt  at  realness,  or  to  state  a  real  and  unmodified  fact 
here,  is  the  statement: 

All  red  rains  are  colored  by  sands  from  the  Sahara  desert. 

My  own  impositivist  acceptances  are: 

That  some  red  rains  are  colored  by  sands  from  the  Sahara  desert; 

Some  by  sands  from  other  terrestrial  sources; 

Some  by  sands  from  other  worlds,  or  from  their  deserts — also  from 
aerial  regions  too  indefinite  or  amorphous  to  be  thought  of  as 
"worlds"  or  planets 

That  no  supposititious  whirlwind  can  account  for  the  hundreds  of 
millions  of  tons  of  matter  that  fell  upon  Australia,  Pacific  Ocean 
and  Atlantic  Ocean  and  Europe  in  1902  and  1903 — that  a  whirlwind 
that  could  do  that  would  not  be  supposititious. 

But  now  we  shall  cast  off  some  of  our  own  wessicality  by  accept- 
ing that  there  have  been  falls  of  red  substance  other  than  sand. 

We  regard  every  science  as  an  expression  of  the  attempt  to  be 
real.  But  to  be  real  is  to  localize  the  universal — or  to  make  some 
one  thing  as  wide  as  all  things — successful  accomplishment  of  which 
I  cannot  conceive  of.  The  prime  resistance  to  this  endeavor  is  the  re- 
fusal of  the  rest  of  the  universe  to  be  damned,  excluded,  disregarded, 
to  receive  Christian  Science  treatment,  by  something  else  so  attempt- 
ing. Although  all  phenomena  are  striving  for  the  Absolute — or  have 
surrendered  to  and  have  incorporated  themselves  in  higher  attempts, 
simply  to  be  phenomenal,  or  to  have  seeming  in  Intermediateness 
is  to  express  relations. 

A  river. 

It  is  water  expressing  the  gravitational  relation  of  different  levels. 

The  water  of  the  river. 

Expression  of  chemic  relations  of  hydrogen  and  oxygen — which 
are  not  final. 

A  city. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  39 

Manifestation  of  commercial  and  social  relations. 

How  could  a  mountain  be  without  base  in  a  greater  body? 

Storekeeper  live  without  customers? 

The  prime  resistance  to  the  positivist  attempt  by  Science  is  its  re- 
lations with  other  phenomena,  or  that  it  only  expresses  those  rela- 
tions in  the  first  place.  Or  that  a  Science  can  have  seeming,  or  survive 
in  Intermediateness,  as  something  pure,  isolated,  positively  different, 
no  more  than  could  a  river  or  a  city  or  a  mountain  or  a  store. 

This  Intermediateness-wide  attempt  by  parts  to  be  wholes — which 
can  not  be  realized  in  our  quasi-state,  if  we  accept  that  in  it  the 
co-existence  of  two  or  more  wholes  or  universals  is  impossible — high 
approximation  to  which,  however,  may  be  thinkable 

Scientists  and  their  dream  of  "pure  science." 

Artists  and  their  dream  of  "art  for  art's  sake." 

It  is  our  notion  that  if  they  could  almost  realize,  that  would  be 
almost  realness:  that  they  would  instantly  be  translated  into  real 
existence.  Such  thinkers  are  good  positivists,  but  they  are  evil  in 
an  economic  and  sociologic  sense,  if,  in  that  sense,  nothing  has 
justification  for  being,  unless  it  serve,  or  function  for,  or  express 
the  relations,  of  some  higher  aggregate.  So  Science  functions  for 
and  serves  society  at  large,  and  would,  from  society  at  large,  receive 
no  support,  unless  it  did  so  divert  itself  or  dissipate  and  prostitute 
itself.  It  seems  that  by  prostitution  I  mean  usefulness. 

There  have  been  red  rains  that,  in  the  middle  ages,  were  called 
"rains  of  blood."  Such  rains  terrified  many  persons,  and  were  so 
unsettling  to  large  populations,  that  Science,  in  its  sociologic  rela- 
tions, has  sought,  by  Mrs.  Eddy's  method,  to  remove  an  evil 

That  "rains  of  blood"  do  not  exist; 

That  rains  so  called  are  only  of  water  colored  by  sand  from  the 
Sahara  desert. 

My  own  acceptance  is  that  such  assurances,  whether  fictitious  or 
not,  whether  the  Sahara  is  a  "dazzling  white"  desert  or  not,  have 
wrought  such  good  effects,  in  a  sociologic  sense,  even  though  prosti- 
tutional  in  the  positivist  sense,  that,  in  the  sociologic  sense,  they 
were  well  justified; 

But  that  we've  gone  on:  that  this  is  the  twentieth  century;  that 
most  of  us  have  grown  up  so  that  such  soporifics  of  the  past  are  no 
longer  necessary: 

That  if  gushes  of  blood  should  fall  from  the  sky  upon  New  York 
City,  business  would  go  on  as  usual. 

We  began  with  rains  that  we  accepted  ourselves  were,  most  likely, 


40  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

only  of  sand.  In  my  own  still  immature  hereticalness — and  by 
heresy,  or  progress,  I  mean,  very  largely,  a  return,  though  with 
many  modifications,  to  the  superstitions  of  the  past,  I  think  I  feel 
considerable  aloofness  to  the  idea  of  rains  of  blood.  Just  at  present, 
it  is  my  conservative,  or  timid  purpose,  to  express  only  that  there 
have  been  red  rains  that  very  strongly  suggest  blood  or  finely  divided 
animal  matter 

Debris  from  inter-planetary  disasters. 

Aerial  battles. 

Food-supplies  from  cargoes  of  super-vessels,  wrecked  in  inter- 
planetary traffic. 

There  was  a  red  rain  in  the  Mediterranean  region,  March  6,  1888. 
Twelve  days  later,  it  fell  again.  Whatever  this  substance  may  have 
been,  when  burned,  the  odor  of  animal  matter  from  it  was  strong 
and  persistent.  (I!  Astronomic,  1888-205.) 

But—infinite  heterogeneity — or  debris  from  many  different  kinds 
of  aerial  cargoes — there  have  been  red  rains  that  have  been  colored 
by  neither  sand  nor  animal  matter. 

Annals  of  Philosophy,  16-226: 

That,  Nov.  2,  1819 — week  before  the  black  rain  and  earthquake 
of  Canada — there  fell,  at  Blankenberge,  Holland,  a  red  rain.  As 
to  sand,  two  chemists  of  Bruges  concentrated  144  ounces  of  the  rain 
to  4  ounces — "no  precipitate  fell."  But  the  color  was  so  marked 
that  had  there  been  sand,  it  would  have  been  deposited,  if  the  sub- 
stance had  been  diluted  instead  of  concentrated.  Experiments  were 
made,  and  various  reagents  did  cast  precipitates,  but  other  than 
sand.  The  chemists  concluded  that  the  rain-water  contained  muriate 
of  cobalt — which  is  not  very  enlightening:  that  could  be  said  of 
many  substances  carried  in  vessels  upon  the  Atlantic  Ocean.  What- 
ever it  may  have  been,  in  the  Annales  de  Chimie,  2-12-432,  its 
color  is  said  to  have  been  red-violet.  For  various  chemic  reactions, 
see  Quar.  Jour.  Roy.  Inst.,  9-202,  and  Edin.  Phil.  Jour.,  2-381. 

Something  that  fell  with  dust  said  to  have  been  meteoric,  March 
9,  10,  n,  1872:  described  in  the  Chemical  News,  25-300,  as  a  "pecu- 
liar substance,"  consisted  of  red  iron  ochre,  carbonate  of  lime,  and 
organic  matter. 

Orange-red  hail,  March  14,  1873,  in  Tuscany.  (Notes  and  Que- 
ries, 9-5-16.) 

Rain  of  lavender-colored  substance,  at  Oudon,  France,  Dec.  19, 
1903.  (Bull.  Soc.  Met.  de  France,  1904-124.) 

La  Nature,  1885-2-351: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  41 

That,  according  to  Prof.  Schwedoff,  there  fell,  in  Russia,  June  14, 
1880,  red  hailstones,  also  blue  hailstones,  also  gray  hailstones. 

Nature,  34-123: 

*A  correspondent  writes  that  he  had  been  told  by  a  resident  of  a 
small  town  in  Venezuela,  that  there,  April  17,  1886,  had  fallen  hail- 
stones, some  red,  some  blue,  some  whitish:  informant  said  to  have 
been  one  unlikely  ever  to  have  heard  of  the  Russian  phenomenon; 
described  as  an  "honest,  plain  countryman." 

Nature,  July  5,  1877,  quotes  a  Roman  correspondent  to  the 
London  Times  who  sent  a  translation  from  an  Italian  newspaper: 
that  a  red  rain  had  fallen  in  Italy,  June  23,  1877,  containing  "micro- 
scopically small  particles  of  sand." 

Or,  according  to  our  acceptance,  any  other  story  would  have  been 
an  evil  thing,  in  the  sociologic  sense,  in  Italy,  in  1877.  But  the 
English  correspondent,  from  a  land  where  terrifying  red  rains  are 
uncommon,  does  not  feel  this  necessity.  He  writes:  "I  am  by  no 
means  satisfied  that  the  rain  was  of  sand  and  water."  His  observa- 

iis  are  that  drops  of  this  rain  left  stains  "such  as  sandy  water 
could  not  leave."  He  notes  that  when  the  water  evaporated,  no 
sand  was  left  behind. 

L'Annee  Scientifique,  1888-75: 

That,  Dec.  13,  1887,  there  fell,  in  Cochin  China,  a  substance 
like  blood,  somewhat  coagulated. 

Annales  de  Chimie,  85-266: 

That  a  thick,  viscous,  red  matter  fell  at  Ulm,  in  1812. 

We  now  have  a  datum  with  a  factor  that  has  been  foreshadowed; 
which  will  recur  and  recur  and  recur  throughout  this  book.  It  is  a 
factor  that  makes  for  speculation  so  revolutionary  that  it  will  have 
to  be  re-enforced  many  times  before  we  can  take  it  into  full  ac- 
ceptance. 

Year  Book  of  Facts,  1861-273: 

Quotation  from  a  letter  from  Prof.  Campini  to  Prof.  Matteucci: 

That,  upon  Dec.  28,  1860,  at  about  7  a.  m.,  in  the  northwestern 
part  of  Siena,  a  reddish  rain  fell  copiously  for  two  hours. 

A  second  red  shower  fell  at  n  o'clock. 

Three  days  later,  the  red  rain  fell  again. 

The  next  day  another  red  rain  fell. 

Still  more  extraordinarily: 

Each  fall  occurred  in  "exactly  the  same  quarter  of  town." 


CHAPTER  IV 

IT  is  in  the  records  of  the  French  Academy  that,  upon  March  17, 
1669,  in  the  town  of  Chatillon-sur-Seine,  fell  a  reddish  substance 
that  was  "thick,  viscous,  and  putrid." 

American  Journal  of  Science,  1-41-404: 

Story  of  a  highly  unpleasant  substance  that  had  fallen  from  the 
sky,  in  Wilson  County,  Tennessee.  We  read  that  Dr.  Troost  visited 
the  place  and  investigated.  Later  we're  going  to  investigate  some 
investigations — but  never  mind  that  now.  Dr.  Troost  reported  that 
the  substance  was  clear  blood  and  portions  of  flesh  scattered  upon 
tobacco  fields.  He  argued  that  a  whirlwind  might  have  taken  an 
animal  up  from  one  place,  mauled  it  around,  and  have  precipitated 
its  remains  somewhere  else. 

But,  in  volume  44,  page  216,  of  the  Journal,  there  is  an  apology. 
The  whole  matter  is,  upon  newspaper  authority,  said  to  have  been 
a  hoax  by  negroes,  who  had  pretended  to  have  seen  the  shower,  for 
the  sake  of  practicing  upon  the  credulity  of  their  masters :  that  they 
had  scattered  the  decaying  flesh  of  a  dead  hog  over  the  tobacco  fields. 

If  we  don't  accept  this  datum,  at  least  we  see  the  sociologically 
necessary  determination  to  have  all  falls  accredited  to  earthly  origins 
— even  when  they're  falls  that  don't  fall. 

Annual  Register,  1821-687: 

That,  upon  the  i3th  of  August,  1819,  something  had  fallen  from 
the  sky  at  Amherst,  Mass.  It  had  been  examined  and  described  by 
Prof.  Graves,  formerly  lecturer  at  Dartmouth  College.  It  was  an 
object  that  had  upon  it  a  nap,  similar  to  that  of  milled  cloth.  Upon 
removing  this  nap,  a  buff-colored,  pulpy  substance  was  found.  It 
had  an  offensive  odor,  and,  upon  exposure  to  the  air,  turned  to  a 
vivid  red.  This  thing  was  said  to  have  fallen  with  a  brilliant  light. 

Also  see  the  Edinburgh  Philosophical  Journal,  5-295.  In  the 
Annates  de  Chbwie,  1821-67,  M.  Arago  accepts  the  datum,  and 
gives  four  instances  of  similar  objects  or  substances  said  to  have 
fallen  from  the  sky,  two  of  which  we  shall  have  with  our  data  of 
gelatinous,  or  viscous  matter,  and  two  of  which  I  omit,  because  it. 
seems  to  me  that  the  dates  given  are  too  far  back. 

42 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  43 

In  the  American  Journal  of  Science,  1-2-335,  is  Professor  Graves* 
account,  communicated  by  Professor  Dewey: 

That,  upon  the  evening  of  August  13,  1819,  a  light  was  seen  in 
Amherst — a  falling  object — sound  as  if  of  an  explosion. 

In  the  home  of  Prof.  Dewey,  this  light  was  reflected  upon  a  wall 
of  a  room  in  which  were  several  members  of  Prof.  Dewey's  family. 

The  next  morning,  in  Prof.  Dewey's  front  yard,  in  what  is  said 
to  have  been  the  only  position  from  which  the  light  that  had  been 
seen  in  the  room,  the  night  before,  could  have  been  reflected,  was 
found  a  substance  "unlike  anything  before  observed  by  anyone  who 
saw  it."  It  was  a  bowl-shaped  object,  about  8  inches  in  diameter, 
and  one  inch  thick.  Bright  buff-colored,  and  having  upon  it  a  "fine 
nap."  Upon  removing  this  covering,  a  buff-colored,  pulpy  substance 
of  the  consistency  of  soft-soap,  was  found — "of  an  offensive,  suf- 
focating smell." 

A  few  minutes  of  exposure  to  the  air  changed  the  buff  color  to  "a 
livid  color  resembling  venous  blood."  It  absorbed  moisture  quickly 
from  the  air  and  liquefied.  For  some  of  the  chemic  reactions,  see 
the  Journal. 

There's  another  lost  quasi-soul  of  a  datum  that  seems  to  me  to 
belong  here: 

London  Times,  April  19,  1836: 

Fall  of  fish  that  had  occurred  in  the  neighborhood  of  Allahabad, 
India,  It  is  said  that  the  fish  were  of  the  chalwa  species,  about  a 
span  in  length  and  a  seer  in  weight — you  know. 

They  were  dead  and  dry. 

Or  they  had  been  such  a  long  time  out  of  water  that  we  can't 
accept  that  they  had  been  scooped  out  of  a  pond,  by  a  whirlwind — 
even  though  they  were  so  definitely  identified  as  of  a  known  local 
species — 

Or  they  were  not  fish  at  all. 

I  incline,  myself,  to  the  acceptance  that  they  were  not  fish,  but 
slender,  fish-shaped  objects  of  the  ?ame  substance  as  that  which 
fell  at  Amherst — it  is  said  that,  whatever  they  were,  they  could 
not  be  eaten:  that  "in  the  pan,  they  turned  to  blood." 

For  details  of  this  story  see  the  Journal  of  the  Asiatic  Society  of 
Bengal,  1834-307.  May  16  or  17,  1834,  is  the  date  given  in  the 
Journal. 

In  the  American  Journal  of  Science,  1-25-362,  occurs  the  inev- 
itable damnation  of  the  Amherst  object: 

Prof.  Edward  Hitchcock  went  to  live  in  Amherst.    He  says  that 


44  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

years  later,  another  object,  like  the  one  said  to  have  fallen  in  1819, 
had  been  found  at  "nearly  the  same  place."  Prof.  Hitchcock  was 
invited  by  Prof.  Graves  to  examine  it.  Exactly  like  the  first  one. 
Corresponded  in  size  and  color  and  consistency.  The  chemic  reac- 
tions were  the  same. 

Prof.  Hitchcock  recognized  it  in  a  moment. 

It  was  a  gelatinous  fungus. 

He  did  not  satisfy  himself  as  to  just  the  exact  species  it  belonged 
to,  but  he  predicted  that  similar  fungi  might  spring  up  within  twenty- 
four  hours — 

But,  before  evening,  two  others  sprang  up. 

Or  we've  arrived  at  one  of  the  oldest  of  the  exclusionists'  conven- 
tions— or  nostoc.  We  shall  have  many  data  of  gelatinous  substance 
said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky:  almost  always  the  exclusionists 
argue  that  it  was  only  nostoc,  an  Alga,  or,  in  some  respects,  a  fung- 
ous growth.  The  rival  convention  is  "spawn  of  frogs  or  of  fishes." 
These  two  conventions  have  made  a  strong  combination.  In  in- 
stances where  testimony  was  not  convincing  that  gelatinous  matter 
had  been  seen  to  fall,  it  was  said  that  the  gelatinous  substance  was 
nostoc,  and  had  been  upon  the  ground  in  the  first  place:  when  the 
testimony  was  too  good  that  it  had  fallen,  it  was  said  to  be  spawn 
that  had  been  carried  from  one  place  to  another  in  a  whirlwind. 

Now,  I  can't  say  that  nostock  is  always  greenish,  any  more  than 
I  can  say  that  blackbirds  are  always  black,  having  seen  a  white  one: 
we  shall  quote  a  scientist  who  knew  of  flesh-colored  nostoc,  when  so 
to  know  was  convenient.  When  we  come  to  reported  falls  of  gel- 
atinous substances,  I'd  like  it  to  be  noticed  how  often  they  are 
described  as  whitish  or  grayish.  In  looking  up  the  subject,  myself, 
I  have  read  only  of  greenish  nostoc.  Said  to  be  greenish,  in  Web- 
ster's Dictionary — said  to  be  "blue-green"  in  the  New  International 
Encyclopedia — "from  bright  green  to  olive-green"  (Science  Gossip, 
10-114);  "green"  (Science  Gossip,  7-260);  "greenish"  (Notes 
and  Queries,  1-11-219).  It  would  seem  acceptable  that,  if  many 
reports  of  white  birds  should  occur,  the  birds  are  not  blackbirds,  even 
though  there  have  been  white  blackbirds.  Or  that,  if  often  reported, 
grayish  or  whitish  gelatinous  substance  is  not  nostoc,  and  is  not 
spawn  if  occurring  in  times  unseasonable  for  spawn. 

"The  Kentucky  Phenomenon." 

So  it  was  called,  in  its  day,  and  now  we  have  an  occurrence  that 
attracted  a  great  deal  of  attention  in  its  own  time.  Usually  these 
things  of  the  accursed  have  been  hushed  up  or  disregarded — sup- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  45 

pressed  like  the  seven  black  rains  of  Slains — but,  upon  March  3, 
1876,  something  occurred,  in  Bath  County,  Kentucky,  that  brought 
many  newspaper  correspondents  to  the  scene. 

The  substance  that  looked  like  beef  that  fell  from  the  sky. 

Upon  March  3,  1876,  at  Olympian  Springs,  Bath  County,  Ken- 
tucky, flakes  of  a  substance  that  looked  like  beef  fell  from  the  sky 
— "from  a  clear  sky."  We'd  like  to  emphasize  that  it  was  said  that 
nothing  but  this  falling  substance  was  visible  in  the  sky.  It  fell  in 
flakes  of  various  sizes;  some  two  inches  square,  one,  three  or  four 
inches  square.  The  flake-formation  is  interesting:  later  we  shall 
think  of  it  as  signifying  pressure — somewhere.  It  was  a  thick 
shower,  on  the  ground,  on  trees,  on  fences,  but  it  was  narrowly  local- 
ized: or  upon  a  strip  of  land  about  100  yards  long  and  about  50  yards 
wide.  For  the  first  account,  see  the  Scientific  American,  34-197, 
and  the  New  York  Times,  March  10,  1876. 

Then  the  exclusionists. 

Something  that  looked  like  beef:  one  flake  of  it  the  size  of  a 
square  envelope. 

If  we  think  of  how  hard  the  exclusionists  have  fought  to  reject 
the  coming  of  ordinary-looking  dust  from  this  earth's  externality, 
we  can  sympathize  with  them  in  this  sensational  instance,  perhaps. 
^Newspaper  correspondents  Wrote  broadcast  and  witnesses  were 
quoted,  and  this  time  there  is  no  mention  of  a  hoax,  and,  except  by 
one  scientist,  there  is  no  denial  that  the  fall  did  take  place. 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  exclusionists  are  still  more  emphatically 
conservators.  It  is  not  so  much  that  they  are  inimical  to  all  data 
of  externally  derived  substances  that  fall  upon  this  earth,  as  that  they 
are  inimical  to  all  data  discordant  with  a  system  that  does  not  in- 
clude such  phenomena — 

Or  the  spirit  or  hope  or  ambition  of  the  cosmos,  which  we  call 
attempted  positivism:  not  to  find  out  the  new;  not  to  add  to  what 
is  called  knowledge,  but  to  systematize. 

Scientific  American  Supplement,  2-426: 

That  the  substance  reported  from  Kentucky  had  been  examined 
by  Leopold  Brandeis. 

"At  last  we  have  a  proper  explanation  of  this  much  talked  of 
phenomenon." 

"It  has  been  comparatively  easy  to  identify  the  substance  and  to 
fix  its  status.  The  Kentucky  'wonder'  is  no  more  or  less  than 
nostoc." 

Or  that  it  had  not  fallen;  that  it  had  been  upon  the  ground  in 


46  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

the  fast  place,  and  had  swollen  in  rain,  and,  attracting  attention  by 
greatly  increased  volume,  had  been  supposed  by  unscientific  ob- 
servers to  have  fallen  in  rain —  . 

What  rain,  I  don't  know. 

Also  it  is  spoken  of  as  "dried"  several  times.  That's  one  of  the 
most  important  of  the  details. 

But  die  relief  of  outraged  propriety,  expressed  in  the  Supple- 
ment, is  amusing  to  some  of  us,  who,  I  fear,  may  be  a  little  im- 
proper at  times.  Very  spirit  of  the  Salvation  Army,  when  some 
third-rate  scientist  comes  out  with  an  explanation  of  the  vermiform 
appendix  or  the  os  cocyx  that  would  have  been  acceptable  to  Moses. 
To  give  completeness  to  "the  proper  explanation,"  it  is  said  that 
Mr.  Brandeis  had  identified  the  substance  as  "flesh-colored"  nostoc. 

Prof.  Lawrence  Smith,  of  Kentucky,  one  of  the  most  resolute  of 
the  exclusionists: 

New  York  Times,  March  12,  1876: 

That  the  substance  had  been  examined  and  analyzed  by  Prof. 
Smith,  according  to  whom,  it  gave  every  indication  of  being  the 
"dried"  spawn  of  some  reptile,  "doubtless  of  the  frog" — or  up  from 
one  place  and  down  in  another.  As  to  "dried,"  that  may  refer  to 
condition  when  Prof.  Smith  received  it. 

In  the  Scientific  American  Supplement,  2-473,  Dr.  A.  Mead 
Edwards,  President  of  the  Newark  Scientific  Association,  writes  that, 
when  he  saw  Mr.  Brandeis'  communication,  his  feeling  was  of  con- 
viction that  propriety  had  been  re-established,  or  that  the  problem 
had  been  solved,  as  he  expresses  it:  knowing  Mr.  Brandeis  well,  he 
had  called  upon  that  upholder  of  respectability,  to  see  the  substance 
that  had  been  identified  as  nostoc.  But  he  had  also  called  upon  Dr. 
Hamilton,  who  had  a  specimen,  and  Dr.  Hamilton  had  declared  it  to 
be  lung-tissue.  Dr.  Edwards  writes  of  the  substance  that  had  so 
completely,  or  beautifully — if  beauty  is  completeness — been  identi- 
fied as  nostoc — "It  turned  out  to  be  lung  tissue  also."  He  wrote  to 
other  persons  who  had  specimens,  and  identified  other  specimens 
as  masses  of  cartilage  or  muscular  fibres.  "As  to  whence  it  came,  I 
have  no  theory."  Nevertheless  he  endorses  the  local  explanation — 
and  a  bizarre  thing  it  is: 

A  flock  of  gorged,  heavy-weighted  buzzards,  but  far  up  and  in- 
visible in  the  clear  sky 

They  had  disgorged. 

Prof.  Fassig  lists  the  substance,  in  his  "Bibliography,"  as  fish 
spawn.  McAtee  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  May,  1918),  lists 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  47 

it  as  a  jelly-like  material,  supposed  to  have  been  the  "dried"  spawn 
either  of  fishes  or  of  some  batrachian. 

Or  this  is  why,  against  the  seemingly  insuperable  odds  against  all 
things  new,  there  can  be  what  is  called  progress — 

That  nothing  is  positive,  in  the  aspects  of  homogeneity  and  unity: 

If  the  whole  world  should  seem  to  combine  against  you,  it  is  only 
unreal  combination,  or  intermediateness  to  unity  and  disunity.  Every 
resistance  is  itself  divided  into  parts  resisting  one  another.  The 
simplest  strategy  seems  to  be — never  bother  to  fight  a  thing:  set 
its  own  parts  fighting  one  another. 

We  are  merging  away  from  carnal  to  gelatinous  substance,  and 
here  there  is  an  abundance  of  instances  or  reports  of  instances.  These 
data  are  so  improper  they're  obscene  to  the  science  of  to-day,  but  we 
shall  see  that  science,  before  it  became  so  rigorous,  was  not  so 
prudish.  Chladni  was  not,  and  Greg  was  not. 

I  shall  have  to  accept,  myself,  that  gelatinous  substance  has  often 
fallen  from  the  sky — 

Or  that,  far  up,  or  far  away,  the  whole  sky  is  gelatinous? 

That  meteors  tear  through  and  detach  fragments? 

That  fragments  are  brought  down  by  storms? 

That  the  twinkling  of  stars  is  penetration  of  light  through  some- 
thing that  quivers? 

I  think,  myself,  that  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  the  whole  sky 
is  gelatinous:  it  seems  more  acceptable  that  only  certain  areas  are. 

Humboldt  (Cosmos,  1-119)  says  that  all  our  data  in  this  respect 
must  be  "classed  amongst  the  mythical  fables  of  mythology."  He 
is  very  sure,  but  just  a  little  redundant. 

We  shall  be  opposed  by  the  standard  resistances: 

There  in  the  first  place; 

Up  from  one  place,  in  a  whirlwind,  and  down  in  another. 

We  shall  not  bother  to  be  very  convincing  one  way  or  another, 
because  of  the  over-shadowing  of  the  datum  with  which  we  shall 
end  up.  It  will  mean  that  something  had  been  in  a  stationary  posi- 
tion for  several  days  over  a  small  part  of  a  small  town  in  England: 
this  is  the  revolutionary  thing  that  we  have  alluded  to  before; 
whether  the  substance  were  nostoc,  or  spawn,  or  some  kind  of  a  larval 
nexus,  doesn't  matter  so  much.  If  it  stood  in  the  sky  for  several 
days,  we  rank  with  Moses  as  a  chronicler  of  improprieties — or  was 
that  story,  or  datum,  we  mean,  told  by  Moses?  Then  we  shall  have 
so  many  records  of  gelatinous  substance  said  to  have  fallen  with 
meteorites,  that,  between  the  two  phenomena,  some  of  us  will  have 


48  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

to  accept  connection — or  that  there  are  at  least  vast  gelatinous  areas 
aloft,  and  that  meteorites  tear  through,  carrying  down  some  of  the 
substance. 

Comptes  Rendus,  3-554* 

That,  in  1836,  M.  Vallot,  member  of  the  French  Academy,  placed 
before  the  Academy  some  fragments  of  a  gelatinous  substance,  said 
to  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  and  asked  that  they  be  analyzed.  There 
is  no  further  allusion  to  this  subject. 

Comptes  Rendus,  23-542: 

That,  in  Wilna,  Lithuania,  April  4,  1846,  in  a  rainstorm,  fell  nut- 
sized  masses  of  a  substance  that  is  described  as  both  resinous  and 
gelatinous.  It  was  odorless  until  burned:  then  it  spread  a  very 
pronounced  sweetish  odor.  It  is  described  as  like  gelatine,  but 
much  firmer:  but,  having  been  in  water  24  hours,  it  swelled  out, 
and  looked  altogether  gelatinous 

It  was  grayish. 

We  are  told  that,  in  1841  and  1846,  a  similar  substance  had 
fallen  in  Asia  Minor. 

In  Notes  and  Queries,  8-6-190,  it  is  said  that,  early  in  August, 
1894,  thousands  of  jelly  fish,  about  the  size  of  a  shilling,  had  fallen 
at  Bath,  England.  I  think  it  is  not  acceptable  that  they  were 
jelly  fish:  but  it  does  look  as  if  this  time  frog  spawn  did  fall  from 
the  sky,  and  may  have  been  translated  by  a  whirlwind — because,  at 
the  same  time,  small  frogs  fell  at  Wigan,  England. 

Nature,  87-10: 

That,  June  24,  1911,  at  Eton,  Bucks,  England,  the  ground  was 
found  covered  with  masses  of  jelly,  the  size  of  peas,  after  a  heavy 
rainfall.  We  are  not  told  of  nostoc,  this  time:  it  is  said  that  the 
object  contained  numerous  eggs  of  "some  species  of  Chironomus, 
from  which  larvae  soon  emerged." 

I  incline,  then,  to  think  that  the  objects  that  fell  at  Bath  were 
neither  jelly  fish  nor  masses  of  frog  spawn,  but  something  of  a 
larval  kind 

This  is  what  had  occurred  at  Bath,  England,  23  years  before. 

London  Times,  April  24,  1871: 

That,  upon  the  22nd  of  April,  1871,  a  storm  of  glutinous  drops 
neither  jelly  fish  nor  masses  of  frog  spawn,  but  something  of  a 
railroad  station,  at  Bath.  "Many  soon  developed  into  a  worm- 
like  chrysalis,  about  an  inch  in  length."  The  account  of  this  occur- 
rence in  the  Zoologist,  2-6-2686,  is  more  like  the  Eton-datum:  of 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  49 

minute  forms,  said  to  have  been  infusoria;  not  forms  about  an  inch 
in  length. 

Trans.  Ent.  Soc.  of  London,  iSyi-proc.  xxii: 

That  the  phenomenon  had  been  investigated  by  the  Rev.  L.  Jenyns, 
of  Bath.  His  description  is  of  minute  worms  in  filmy  envelopes. 
He  tries  to  account  for  their  segregation.  The  mystery  of  it 
is:  what  could  have  brought  so  many  of  them  together?  Many  other 
falls  we  shall  have  record  of,  and  in  most  of  them  segregation  is 
the  great  mystery.  A  whirlwind  seems  anything  but  a  segregative 
force.  Segregation  of  things  that  have  fallen  from  the  sky  has  been 
avoided  as  most  deep-dyed  of  the  damned.  Mr.  Jenyns  conceives  of 
a  large  pool,  in  which  were  many  of  these  spherical  masses:  of  the 
pool  drying  up  and  concentrating  all  in  a  small  area;  of  a  whirl- 
wind then  scooping  all  up  together 

But  several  days  later,  more  of  these  objects  fell  in  the  same 
place. 

That  such  marksmanship  is  not  attributable  to  whirlwinds  seems 
to  me  to  be  what  we  think  we  mean  by  common  sense: 

It  may  not  look  like  common  sense  to  say  that  these  things  had 
been  stationary  over  the  town  of  Bath,  several  days 

The  seven  black  rains  of  Slains; 

The  four  red  rains  of  Siena. 

An  interesting  sidelight  on  the  mechanics  of  orthodoxy  is  that 
Mr.  Jenyns  dutifully  records  the  second  fall,  but  ignores  it  in  his 
explanation. 

R.  P.  Greg,  one  of  the  most  notable  of  cataloguers  of  meteoritic 
phenomena,  records  (Phil.  Mag.:  4-8-463)  falls  of  viscid  substance 
in  the  years  1652,  1686,  1718,  1796,  1811,  1819,  1844.  He  gives 
earlier  dates,  but  I  practice  exclusions,  myself.  In  the  Report 
of  the  British  Association,  1860-63,  Greg  records  a  meteor  that 
seemed  to  pass  near  the  ground,  between  Barsdorf  and  Freiburg, 
Germany:  the  next  day  a  jelly-like  mass  was  found  in  the  snow 

Unseasonableness  for  either  spawn  or  nostoc. 

Greg's  comment  in  this  instance  is:  "curious  if  true."  But  he 
records  without  modification  the  fall  of  a  meteorite  at  Gotha, 
Germany,  Sept.  6,  1835,  "leaving  a  jelly-like  mass  on  the  ground." 
We  are  told  that  this  substance  fell  only  three  feet  away  from  an 
observer.  In  the  Report  of  the  British  Association,  1855-94,  ac- 
cording to  a  letter  from  Greg  to  Prof.  Baden-Powell,  at  night,  Oct. 
8,  1844,  near  Coblentz,  a  German,  who  was  known  to  Greg,  and 
another  person,  saw  a  luminous  body  fall  close  to  them.  They 


50  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

returned  next  morning  and  found  a  gelatinous  mass  of  grayish  color. 

According  to  Chladni's  account  (Annals  of  Philosophy,  n.s., 
12-94)  a.  viscous  mass  fell  with  a  luminous  meteorite  between  Siena 
and  Rome,  May,  1652;  viscous  matter  found  after  the  fall  of  a 
fire  ball,  in  Lusatia,  March,  1796;  fall  of  a  gelatinous  substance, 
after  the  explosion  of  a  meteorite,  near  Heidelburg,  July,  1811. 
In  the  Edinbwgh  Philosophical  Journal,  1-234,  the  substance  that 
fell  at  Lusatia  is  said  to  have  been  of  the  "color  and  odor  of  dried, 
brown  varnish."  In  the  Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  1-26-133,  it  is  said  that 
gelatinous  matter  fell  with  a  globe  of  fire,  upon  the  island  of  Lethy, 
India,  1718. 

In  the  Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  1-26-396,  in  many  observations  upon 
the  meteors  of  November,  1833,  are  reports  of  falls  of  gelatinous 
substance: 

That,  according  to  newspaper  reports,  "lumps  of  jelly"  were 
found  on  the  ground  at  Rahway,  N.  J.  The  substance  was  whitish, 
or  resembled  the  coagulated  white  of  an  egg; 

That  Mr.  H.  H.  Garland,  of  Nelson  County,  Virginia,  had  found 
a  jelly-like  substance  of  about  the  circumference  of  a  twenty-five- 
cent  piece; 

That,  according  to  a  communication  from  A.  C.  Twining  to  Prof. 
Olmstead,  a  woman  at  West  Point,  N.  Y.,  had  seen  a  mass  the  size 
of  a  tea  cup.  It  looked  like  boiled  starch; 

That,  according  to  a  newspaper,  of  Newark,  N.  J.,  a  mass  of 
gelatinous  substance,  like  soft  soap,  had  been  found.  "It  possessed 
little  elasticity,  and,  on  the  application  of  heat,  it  evaporated  as 
readily  as  water." 

It  seems  incredible  that  a  scientist  would  have  such  hardihood, 
or  infidelity,  as  to  accept  that  these  things  had  fallen  from  the  sky: 
nevertheless,  Prof.  Olmstead,  who  collected  these  lost  souls  says: 

"The  fact  that  the  supposed  deposits  were  so  uniformly  described 
as  gelatinous  substance  forms  a  presumption  in  favor  of  the  sup- 
position that  they  had  the  origin  ascribed  to  them." 

In  contemporaneous  scientific  publications  considerable  attention 
was  given  to  Prof.  Olmstead's  series  of  papers  upon  this  subject 
of  the  November  meteors.  You  will  not  find  one  mention  of  the 
part  that  treats  of  gelatinous  matter. 


CHAPTER  V 

I  SHALL  attempt  not  much  of  correlation  of  dates.  A  mathe- 
matic-minded  positivist,  with  his  delusion  that  in  an  interme- 
diate state  twice  two  are  four,  whereas,  if  we  accept  Continuity,  we 
can  not  accept  that  there  are  anywhere  two  things  to  start  with, 
would  search  our  data  for  periodicities.  It  is  so  obvious  to  me  that 
the  mathematic,  or  the  regular,  is  the  attribute  of  the  Universal,  that 
I  have  not  much  inclination  to  look  for  it  in  the  local.  Still,  in  this 
solar  system,  "as  a  whole,"  there  is  considerable  approximation  to 
regularity;  or  the  mathematic  is  so  nearly  localized  that  eclipses, 
for  instance,  can,  with  rather  high  approximation,  be  foretold, 
though  I  have  notes  that  would  deflate  a  little  the  astronomers' 
vainglory  in  this  respect — or  would  if  that  were  possible.  An  as- 
tronomer is  poorly  paid,  uncheered  by  crowds,  considerably  isolated: 
he  lives  upon  his  own  inflations:  deflate  a  bear  and  it  couldn't 
hibernate.  This  solar  system  is  like  every  other  phenomenon  that 
can  be  regarded  "as  a  whole" — or  the  affairs  of  a  ward  are  inter- 
fered with  by  the  affairs  of  the  city  of  which  it  is  a  part;  city  by 
county;  county  by  state;  state  by  nation;  nation  by  other  nations; 
all  nations  by  climatic  conditions;  climatic  conditions  by  solar  cir- 
cumstances; sun  by  general  planetary  circumstances;  solar  system 
"as  a  whole"  by  other  solar  systems — so  the  hopelessness  of  finding 
the  phenomena  of  entirety  in  the  ward  of  a  city.  But  positivists 
are  those  who  try  to  find  the  unrelated  in  the  ward  of  a  city.  In 
our  acceptance  this  is  the  spirit  of  cosmic  religion.  Objectively  the 
state  is  not  realizable  in  the  ward  of  a  city.  But,  if  a  positivist 
could  bring  himself  to  absolute  belief  that  he  had  found  it,  that 
would  be  a  subjective  realization  of  that  which  is  unrealizable  ob- 
jectively. Of  course  we  do  not  draw  a  positive  line  between  the 
objective  and  the  subjective — or  that  all  phenomena  called  things 
or  persons  are  subjective  within  one  all-inclusive  nexus,  and  that 
thoughts  within  those  that  are  commonly  called  "persons"  are  sub- 
subjective.  It  is  rather  as  if  Intermediateness  strove  for  Regularity 
in  this  solar  system  and  failed:  then  generated  the  mentality  of 
astronomers,  and,  in  that  secondary  expression,  strove  for  convic- 
tion that  failure  had  been  success. 

51 


52  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

I  have  tabulated  all  the  data  of  this  book,  and  a  great  deal 
besides — card  system — and  several  proximities,  thus  emphasized, 
have  been  revelations  to  me:  nevertheless,  it  is  only  the  method  of 
theologians  and  scientists — worst  of  all,  of  statisticians. 

For  instance,  by  the  statistic  method,  I  could  "prove"  that  a 
black  rain  has  fallen  "regularly"  every  seven  months,  somewhere 
upon  this  earth.  To  do  this,  I'd  have  to  include  red  rains  and 
yellow  rains,  but,  conventionally,  I'd  pick  out  the  black  particles 
in  red  substances  and  in  yellow  substances,  and  disregard  the  rest. 
Then,  too,  if  here  and  there,  a  black  rain  should  be  a  week  early 
or  a  month  late — that  would  be  "acceleration"  or  "retardation." 
This  is  supposed  to  be  legitimate  in  working  out  the  periodicities 
of  comets.  If  black  rains,  or  red  or  yellow  rains  with  black  par- 
ticles in  them,  should  not  appear  at  all  near  some  dates — we  have 
not  read  Darwin  in  vain — "the  records  are  not  complete."  As  to 
other,  interfering  black  rains,  they'd  be  either  gray  or  brown,  or 
for  them  we'd  find  other  periodicities. 

Still,  I  have  had  to  notice  the  year  1819,  for  instance.  I  shall 
not  note  them  all  in  this  book,  but  I  have  records  of  31  extraor- 
dinary events  in  1883.  Some  one  should  write  a  book  upon  the 
phenomena  of  this  one  year — that  is  if  books  should  be  written. 
1849  is  notable  for  extraordinary  falls,  so  far  apart  that  a  local 
explanation  seems  inadequate — not  only  the  black  rain  of  Ireland, 
May,  1849,  but  a  red  rain  in  Sicily  and  a  red  rain  in  Wales.  Also, 
it  is  said  (Timb's  Year  Book,  1850-241)  that,  upon  April  18  or 
20,  1849,  shepherds  near  Mt.  Araat,  found  a  substance  that  was 
not  indigenous,  upon  areas  measuring  8  to  10  miles  in  circumfer- 
ence. Presumably  it  had  fallen  there. 

We  have  already  gone  into  the  subject  of  Science  and  its  attempted 
positiveness,  and  its  resistances  in  that  it  must  have  relations  of 
service.  It  is  very  easy  to  see  that  most  of  the  theoretic  science 
of  the  1 9th  century  was  only  a  relation  of  reaction  against  theologic 
dogma,  and  has  no  more  to  do  with  Truth  than  has  a  wave  that 
bounds  back  from  a  shore.  Or,  if  a  shop  girl,  or  you  or  I,  should 
pull  out  a  piece  of  chewing  gum  about  a  yard  long,  that  would  be 
quite  as  scientific  a  performance  as  was  the  stretching  of  this 
earth's  age  several  hundred  million  of  years. 

All  "things"  are  not  things,  but  only  relations,  or  expressions 
of  relations:  but  all  relations  are  striving  to  be  the  unrelated,  or 
have  surrendered  to,  and  subordinated  to,  higher  attempts.  So  there 
is  a  positivist  aspect  to  this  reaction  that  is  itself  only  a  relation,  and 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  53 

that  is  the  attempt  to  assimilate  all  phenomena  under  the  materialist 
explanation,  or  to  formulate  a  final,  all-inclusive  system,  upon  the 
materialist  basis.  If  this  attempt  could  be  realized,  that  would  be 
the  attaining  of  realness;  but  this  attempt  can  be  made  only  by 
disregarding  psychic  phenomena,  for  instance — or,  if  science  shall 
eventually  give  in  to  the  psychic,  it  would  be  no  more  legitimate 
to  explain  the  immaterial  in  terms  of  the  material,  than  to  explain 
the  material  in  terms  of  the  immaterial.  Our  own  acceptance  is 
that  material  and  immaterial  are  of  a  oneness,  merging,  for  instance, 
in  a  thought  that  is  continuous  with  a  physical  action:  that  oneness 
can  not  be  explained,  because  the  process  of  explaining  is  the  inter- 
preting of  something  in  terms  of  something  else.  All  explanation  is 
assimilation  of  something  in  terms  of  something  else  that  has  been 
taken  as  a  basis:  but,  in  Continuity,  there  is  nothing  that  is  any 
more  basic  than  anything  else — unless  we  think  that  delusion  built 
upon  delusion  is  less  real  than  its  pseudo-foundation. 

In  1829  (Timb's  Year  Book,  1848-235)  in  Persia,  fell  a  sub- 
stance that  the  people  said  they  had  never  seen  before.  As  to  what 
it  was,  they  had  not  a  notion,  but  they  saw  that  the  sheep  ate  it. 
They  ground  it  into  flour  and  made  bread,  said  to  have  been  pass- 
able enough,  though  insipid. 

That  was  a  chance  that  science  did  not  neglect.  Manna  was 
placed  upon  a  reasonable  basis,  or  was  assimilated  and  reconciled 
with  the  system  that  had  ousted  the  older — and  less  nearly  real — 
system.  It  was  said  that,  likely  enough,  manna  had  fallen  in 
ancient  times — because  it  was  still  falling — but  that  there  was  no 
tutelary  influence  behind  it — that  it  was  a  lichen  from  the  steppes 
of  Asia  Minor — "up  from  one  place  in  a  whirlwind  and  down  in 
another  place."  In  the  American  Almanac,  1833-71,  it  is  said 
that  this  substance — "unknown  to  the  inhabitants  of  the  region" — 
was  "immediately  recognized"  by  scientists  who  examined  it:  and 
that  "the  chemical  analysis  also  identified  it  as  a  lichen." 

This  was  back  in  the  days  when  Chemical  Analysis  was  a  god. 
Since  then  his  devotees  have  been  shocked  and  disillusioned.  Just 
how  a  chemical  analysis  could  so  botanize,  I  don't  know — but  it 
was  Chemical  Analysis  who  spoke,  and  spoke  dogmatically.  It 
seems  to  me  that  the  ignorance  of  inhabitants,  contrasting  with  the 
local  knowledge  of  foreign  scientists,  is  overdone:  if  there's  anything 
good  to  eat,  within  any  distance  conveniently  covered  by  a  wliirlwind 
— inhabitants  know  it.  I  have  data  of  other  falls,  in  Persia  and 
Asiatic  Turkey,  of  edible  substances.  They  are  all  dogmatically 


54  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

said  to  be  "manna";  and  "manna"  is  dogmatically  said  to  be  a 
species  of  lichens  from  the  steppes  of  Asia  Minor.  The  position 
that  I  take  is  that  this  explanation  was  evolved  in  ignorance  of  the 
fall  of  vegetable  substances,  or  edible  substances,  in  other  parts  of 
the  world:  that  it  is  the  familiar  attempt  to  explain  the  general 
in  terms  of  the  local ;  that,  if  we  shall  have  data  of  falls  of  vegetable 
substance,  in,  say,  Canada,  or  India,  they  were  not  of  lichens  from 
the  steppes  of  Asia  Minor;  that,  though  all  falls  in  Asiatic  Turkey 
and  Persia  are  sweepingly  and  conveniently  called  showers  of 
"manna,"  they  have  not  been  even  all  of  the  same  substance.  In 
one  instance  the  particles  are  said  to  have  been  "seeds."  Though, 
in  Comptes  Rendus,  the  substance  that  fell  in  1841  and  1846,  is 
said  to  have  been  gelatinous,  in  the  Bull.  Sci.  Nat.  de  Neuchatel, 
it  is  said  to  have  been  of  something,  in  lumps  the  size  of  a  filbert, 
that  had  been  ground  into  flour;  that  of  this  flour  had  been  made 
bread,  very  attractive-looking,  but  flavorless. 

The  great  difficulty  is  to  explain  segregation  in  these  showers 

But  deep  sea  fishes  and  occasional  falls  down  to  them,  of  edible 
substances;  bags  of  grain,  barrels  of  sugar;  things  that  had  not  been 
whirled  up  from  one  part  of  the  ocean-bottom,  in  storms  or  subma- 
rine disturbances,  and  dropped  somewhere  else 

I  suppose  one  thinks — but  grtiin  in  bags  never  has  fallen 

Object  of  Amherst — its  covering  like  "milled  cloth" 

Or  barrels  of  corn  lost  from  a  vessel  would  not  sink — but  a  host 
of  them  clashing  together,  after  a  wreck — they  burst  open ;  the  corn 

sinks,  or  does  when  saturated;  the  barrel  staves  float  longer 

If  there  be  not  an  overhead  traffic  in  commodities  similar  to 
our  own  commodities  carried  over  this  earth's  oceans — I'm  not  the 
deep-sea  fish  I  think  I  am. 

I  have  no  data  other  than  the  mere  suggestion  of  the  Amherst 
object  of  bags  or  barrels,  but  my  notion  is  that  bags  and  barrels 
from  a  wreck  on  one  of  this  earth's  oceans,  would,  by  the  time  they 
reached  the  bottom,  no  longer  be  recognizable  as  bags  or  barrels; 
that,  if  we  can  have  data  of  the  fall  of  fibrous  material  that  may 
have  been  cloth  or  paper  or  wood,  we  shall  be  satisfactory  and 
grotesque  enough. 
Proc.  Roy.  Irish  Acad.,  1-379: 

"In  the  year  1686,  some  workmen,  who  had  been  fetching  water 
from  a  pond,  seven  German  miles  from  Memel,  on  returning  to 
their  work,  after  dinner  (during  which  there  had  been  a  snow  storm) 
found  the  flat  ground  around  the  pond  covered  with  a  coal-black, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  55 

leafy  mass;  and  a  person  who  lived  near  said  he  had  seen  it  fall 
like  flakes  with  the  snow." 

Some  of  these  flake-like  formations  were  as  large  as  a  table-top. 

"The  mass  was  damp  and  smelt  disagreeably,  like  rotten  seaweed, 
but,  when  dried,  the  smell  went  off." 

"It  tore  fibrously,  like  paper." 

Classic  explanation: 

"Up  from  one  place,  and  down  in  another." 

But  what  went  up,  from  one  place,  in  a  whirlwind?  Of  course, 
our  Intermediatist  acceptance  is  that  had  this  been  the  strangest 
substance  conceivable,  from  the  strangest  other  world  that  could 
be  thought  of;  somewhere  upon  this  earth  there  must  be  a  substance 
similar  to  it,  or  from  which  it  would,  at  least  subjectively,  or  accord- 
ing to  description,  not  be  easily  distinguishable.  Or  that  every- 
thing in  New  York  City  is  only  another  degree  or  aspect  of 
something,  or  combination  of  things,  in  a  village  of  Central  Africa. 
The  novel  is  a  challenge  to  vulgarization:  write  something  that 
looks  new  to  you:  some  one  will  point  out  that  the  thrice-accursed 
Greeks  said  it  long  ago.  Existence  is  Appetite:  the  gnaw  of  being; 
the  one  attempt  of  all  things  to  assimilate  all  other  things,  if  they 
have  not  surrendered  and  submitted  to  some  higher  attempt.  It  was 
cosmic  that  these  scientists,  who  had  surrendered  to  and  submitted 
to  the  Scientific  System,  should,  consistently  with  the  principles  of 
that  system,  attempt  to  assimilate  the  substance  that  fell  at  Memel 
with  some  known  terrestrial  product.  At  the  meeting  of  the  Royal 
Irish  Academy  it  was  brought  out  that  there  is  a  substance,  of 
rather  rare  occurrence,  that  has  been  known  to  form  in  thin  sheets 
upon  marsh  land. 

It  looks  like  greenish  felt. 

The  substance  of  Memel: 

Damp,  coal-black,  leafy  mass. 

But,  if  broken  up,  the  marsh-substance  is  flake-like,  and  it  tears 
fibrously. 

An  elephant  can  be  identified  as  a  sunflower — both  have  long 
stems.  A  camel  is  indistinguishable  from  a  peanut — if  only  their 
humps  be  considered. 

Trouble  with  this  book  is  that  we'll  end  up  a  lot  of  intellectual 
roues:  we'll  be  incapable  of  being  astonished  with  anything.  We 
knew,  to  start  with,  that  science  and  imbecility  are  continuous; 
nevertheless  so  many  expressions  of  the  merging-point  are  at  first 
startling.  We  did  think  that  Prof.  Hitchcock's  performance  in 


56  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

identifying  the  Amherst  phenomenon  as  a  fungus  was  rather  notable 
as  scientific  vaudeville,  if  we  acquit  him  of  the  charge  of  serious- 
ness— or  that,  in  a  place  where  fungi  were  so  common  that,  before 
a  given  evening  two  of  them  sprang  up,  only  he,  a  stranger  in  this 
very  fungiferous  place,  knew  a  fungus  when  he  saw  something 
like  a  fungus — if  we  disregard  its  quick  liquefaction,  for  instance. 
It  was  only  a  monologue,  however:  now  we  have  an  all-star  cast: 
and  they're  not  only  Irish;  they're  royal  Irish. 

The  royal  Irishmen  excluded  "coal-blackness"  and  included 
fibrousness:  so  then  that  this  substance  was  "marsh-paper,"  which 
"had  been  raised  into  the  air  by  storms  of  wind,  and  had  again 
fallen." 

Second  act: 

It  was  said  that,  according  to  M.  Ehrenberg,  "the  meteor-paper 
was  found  to  consist  partly  of  vegetable  matter,  chiefly  of  conifervae." 

Third  act: 

Meeting  of  the  royal  Irishmen:  chairs,  tables,  Irishmen: 

Some  flakes  of  marsh-paper  were  exhibited. 

Their  composition  was  chiefly  of  conifervse. 

This  was  a  double  inclusion:  or  it's  the  method  of  agreement  that 
logicians  make  so  much  of.  So  no  logician  would  be  satisfied  with 
identifying  a  peanut  as  a  camel,  because  both  have  humps:  he 
demands  accessory  agreement — that  both  can  live  a  long  time  with- 
out water,  for  instance. 

Now,  it's  not  so  very  unreasonable,  at  least  to  the  free  and  easy 
vaudeville  standards  that,  throughout  this  book,  we  are  considering, 
to  think  that  a  green  substance  could  be  snatched  up  from  one 
place  in  a  whirlwind,  and  fall  as  a  black  substance  somewhere  else: 
but  the  royal  Irishmen  excluded  something  else,  and  it  is  a  datum 
that  was  as  accessible  to  them  as  it  is  to  me: 

That,  according  to  Chladni,  this  was  no  little,  local  deposition  that 
was  seen  to  occur  by  some  indefinite  person  living  near  a  pond 
somewhere. 

It  was  a  tremendous  fall  from  a  vast  sky-area. 

Likely  enough  all  the  marsh  paper  in  the  world  could  not  have 
supplied  it. 

At  the  same  time,  this  substance  was  falling  "in  great  quantities," 
in  Norway  and  Pomerania.  Or  see  Kirkwood,  Meteoric  Astronomy, 
p.  66: 

"Substance  like  charred  paper  fell  in  Norway  and  other  parts  of 
northern  Europe,  Jan.  31,  1686." 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  57 

Or  a  whirlwind,  with  a  distribution  as  wide  as  that,  would  not 
acceptably,  I  should  say,  have  so  specialized  in  the  rare  substance 
called  "marsh  paper."  There'd  have  been  falls  of  fence  rails,  roofs 
of  houses,  parts  of  trees.  Nothing  is  said  of  the  occurrence  of  a 
tornado  in  northern  Europe,  in  January,  1686.  There  is  record  only 
of  this  one  substance  having  fallen  in  various  places. 

Time  went  on,  but  the  conventional  determination  to  exclude  data 
of  all  falls  to  this  earth,  except  of  substances  of  this  earth,  and  of 
ordinary  meteoric  matter,  strengthened. 

Annals  of  Philosophy,  16-68: 

The  substance  that  fell  in  January,  1686,  is  described  as  "a  mass 
of  black  leaves,  having  the  appearance  of  burnt  paper,  but  harder, 
and  cohering,  and  brittle." 

"Marsh  paper"  is  not  mentioned,  and  there  is  nothing  said  of 
the  "conifervae,"  which  seemed  so  convincing  to  the  royal  Irish- 
men. Vegetable  composition  is  disregarded,  quite  as  it  might  be  by 
some  one  who  might  find  it  convenient  to  identify  a  crook-necked 
squash  as  a  big  fish  hook. 

Meteorites  are  usually  covered  with  a  black  crust,  more  or  less 
scale-like.  The  substance  of  1686  is  black  and  scale-like.  If  so 
be  convenience,  "leaf -likeness"  is  "scale-likeness."  In  this  attempt 
to  assimilate  with  the  conventional,  we  are  told  that  the  substance  is 
a  mineral  mass:  that  it  is  like  the  black  scales  that  cover  meteorites. 

The  scientist  who  made  this  "identification"  was  Von  Grotthus. 
He  had  appealed  to  the  god  Chemical  Analysis.  Or  the  power  and 
glory  of  mankind — with  which  we're  not  always  so  impressed — but 
the  gods  must  tell  us  what  we  want  them  to  tell  us.  We  see  again 
that,  though  nothing  has  identity  of  its  own,  anything  can  be  "iden- 
tified" as  anything.  Or  there's  nothing  that's  not  reasonable,  if 
one  snoopeth  not  into  its  exclusions.  But  here  the  conflict  did  not 
end.  Berzelius  examined  the  substance.  He  could  not  find  nickel 
in  it.  At  that  time,  the  presence  of  nickel  was  the  "positive"  test 
of  meteoritic  matter.  Whereupon,  with  a  supposititious  "positive" 
standard  cf  judgment  against  him,  Von  Grotthus  revoked  his  "iden- 
tification." (Annals  and  Mag.  of  Nat.  Hist.,  1-3-185.) 

This  equalization  of  eminences,  permits  us  to  project  with  our 
own  expression,  which,  otherwise,  would  be  subdued  into  invisi- 
bility: 

That  it's  too  bad  that  no  one  ever  looked  to  see — hieroglyphics? — 
something  written  upon  these  sheets  of  paper? 

If  we  have  no  very  great  variety  of  substances  that  have  fallen 


58  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

to  this  earth;  if,  upon  this  earth's  surface  there  is  infinite  variety 
of  substances  detachable  by  whirlwinds,  two  falls  of  such  a  rare 
substance  as  marsh  paper  would  be  remarkable. 

A  writer  in  the  Edinburgh  Review,  87-194,  says  that,  at  the 
time  of  writing,  he  had  before  him  a  portion  of  a  sheet  of  200  square 
feet,  of  a  substance  that  had  fallen  at  Carolath,  Silesia,  in  1839 — 
exactly  similar  to  cotton-felt,  of  which  clothing  might  have  been 
made.  The  god  Microscopic  Examination  had  spoken.  The  sub- 
stance consisted  chiefly  of  conifervae. 

Jour.  Asiatic  Soc.  of  Bengal,  i84y-pt.  1-193: 

That  March  16,  1846 — about  the  time  of  a  fall  of  edible  substance 
in  Asia  Minor — an  olive-gray  powder  fell  at  Shanghai.  Under  the 
microscope,  it  was  seen  to  be  an  aggregation  of  hairs  of  two  kinds, 
black  ones  and  rather  thick  white  ones.  They  were  supposed  to 
be  mineral  fibres,  but,  when  burned,  they  gave  out  "the  common 
ammonical  smell  and  smoke  of  burnt  hair  or  feathers."  The  writer 
described  the  phenomenon  as  "a  cloud  of  3800  square  miles  of 
fibers,  alkali,  and  sand."  In  a  postscript,  he  says  that  other  inves- 
tigators, with  more  powerful  microscopes,  gave  opinion  that  the  fibres 
were  not  hairs;  that  the  substance  consisted  chiefly  of  conifervae. 

Or  the  pathos  of  it,  perhaps;  or  the  dull  and  uninspired,  but 
courageous  persistence  of  the  scientific:  everything  seemingly  found 
out  is  doomed  to  be  subverted — by  more  powerful  microscopes  and 
telescopes;  by  more  refined,  precise,  searching  means  and  methods — 
the  new  pronouncements  irrepressibly  bobbing  up;  their  reception 
always  as  Truth  at  last;  always  the  illusion  of  the  final;  very  little 
of  the  Intermediatist  spirit 

That  the  new  that  has  displaced  the  ojd  will  itself  some  day  be 
displaced;  that  it,  too,  will  be  recognized  as  myth-stuff 

But  that  if  phantoms  climb,  spooks  of  ladders  are  good  enough 
for  them. 

Annual  Register,  1821-681: 

That,  according  to  a  report  by  M.  Laine,  French  Consul  at  Per- 
nambuco,  early  in  October,  1821,  there  was  a  shower  of  a  substance 
resembling  silk.  The  quantity  was  as  tremendous  as  might  be  a 
whole  cargo,  lost  somewhere  between  Jupiter  and  Mars,  having 
drifted  around  perhaps  for  centuries,  the  original  fabrics  slowly  dis- 
integrating. In  Annales  de  Chimie,  2-15-427,  it  is  said  that  sam- 
ples of  this  substance  were  sent  to  France  by  M.  Laine,  and  that 
they  proved  to  have  some  resemblances  to  silky  filaments  which,  at 
certain  times  of  the  year,  are  carried  by  the  wind  near  Paris. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  59 

In  the  Annals  of  Philosophy,  n.s.,  12-93,  there  is  mention  of 
a  fibrous  substance  like  blue  silk  that  fell  near  Naumberg,  March  23, 
1665.  According  to  Chladni  (Annales  de  Chimie,  2-31-264), 
the  quantity  was  great.  He  places  a  question  mark  before  the 
date. 

One  of  the  advantages  of  Intermediatism  is  that,  in  the  oneness 
of  quasiness,  there  can  be  no  mixed  metaphors.  Whatever  is  ac- 
ceptable of  anything,  is,  in  some  degree  or  aspect,  acceptable  of 
everything.  So  it  is  quite  proper  to  speak,  for  instance,  of  some- 
thing that  is  as  firm  as  a  rock  and  that  sails  in  a  majestic  march. 
The  Irish  are  good  monists:  they  have  of  course  been  laughed  at 
for  their  keener  perceptions.  So  it's  a  book  we're  writing,  or  it's 
a  procession,  or  it's  a  museum,  with  the  Chamber  of  Horrors  rather 
over-emphasized.  A  rather  horrible  correlation  occurs  in  the  Scien- 
tific American,  1859-178.  What  interests  us  is  that  a  correspon- 
dent saw  a  silky  substance  fall  from  the  sky — there  was  an  aurora 
borealis  at  the  time — he  attributes  the  substance  to  the  aurora. 

Since  the  time  of  Darwin,  the  classic  explanation  has  been  that 
all  silky  substances  that  fall  from  the  sky  are  spider  webs.  In 
1832,  aboard  the  Beagle,  at  the  mouth  of  La  Plata  River,  60  miles 
from  land,  Darwin  saw  an  enormous  number  of  spiders,  of  the 
kind  usually  known  as  "gossamer"  spiders,  little  aeronauts  that  cast 
out  filaments  by  which  the  wind  carries  them. 

It's  difficult  to  express  that  silky  substances  that  have  fallen  to 
this  earth  were  not  spider  webs.  My  own  acceptance  is  that  spider 
webs  are  the  merger;  that  there  have  been  falls  of  an  externally 
derived  silky  substance,  and  also  of  the  webs,  or  strands,  rather,  of 
aeronautic  spiders  indigen6us  to  this  earth ;  that  in  some  instances  if? 
is  impossible  to  distinguish  one  from  the  other.  Of  course,  our  ex- 
pression upon  silky  substances  will  merge  away  into  expressions 
upon  other  seeming  textile  substances,  and  I  don't  know  how  much 
better  off  we'll  be 

Except  that,  if  fabricable  materials  have  fallen  from  the  sky 

Simply  to  establish  acceptance  of  that  may  be  doing  well  enough 
in  this  book  of  first  and  tentative  explorations. 

In  All  the  Year  Round,  8-254,  is  described  a  fall  that  took  place 
in  England,  Sept.  21,  1741,  in  the  towns  of  Bradly,  Selbourae,  and 
Alresford,  and  in  a  triangular  space  included  by  these  three  towns. 
The  substance  is  described  as  "cobwebs" — but  it  fell  in  flake-forma- 
tion, or  in  "flakes  or  rags  about  one  inch  broad  and  five  or  six  inches 
long."  Also  these  flakes  were  of  a  relatively  heavy  substance — 


6o  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

"they  fell  with  some  velocity."  The  quantity  was  great — the 
shortest  side  of  the  triangular  space  is  eight  miles  long.  In  the 
Wernerian  Nat.  Hist.  Soc.  Trans.,  5-386,  it  is  said  that  there 
were  two  falls — that  they  were  some  hours  apart — a  datum  that  is 
becoming  familiar  to  us — a  datum  that  can  not  be  taken  into  the 
fold,  unless  we  find  it  repeated  over  and  over  and  over  again.  It  is 
said  that  the  second  fall  lasted  from  nine  o'clock  in  the  morning  until 
night. 

Now  the  hypnosis  of  the  classic — that  what  we  call  intelligence 
is  only  an  expression  of  inequilibrium;  that  when  mental  adjustments 
are  made,  intelligence  ceases — or,  of  course,  that  intelligence  is  the 
confession  of  ignorance.  If  you  have  intelligence  upon  any  subject, 
that  is  something  you're  still  learning — if  we  agree  that  that  which 
is  learned  is  always  mechanically  done — in  quasi-terms,  of  course, 
because  nothing  is  ever  finally  learned. 

It  was  decided  that  this  substance  was  spiders'  web.  That  was 
adjustment.  But  it's  not  adjustment  to  me;  so  I'm  afraid  I  shall 
have  some  intelligence  in  this  matter.  If  I  ever  arrive  at  adjustment 
upon  this  subject,  then,  upon  this  subject,  I  shall  be  able  to  have 
no  thoughts,  except  routine-thoughts.  I  haven't  yet  quite  decided 
absolutely  everything,  so  I  am  able  to  point  out: 

That  this  substance  was  of  quantity  so  enormous  that  it  attracted 
wide  attention  when  it  came  down 

That  it  would  have  been  equally  noteworthy  when  it  went  up 

That  there  is  no  record  of  any  one,  in  England  or  elsewhere, 
having  seen  tons  of  "spider  webs"  going  up,  September,  1741. 

Further  confession  of  intelligence  upon  my  part: 

That,  if  it  be  contested,  then,  that  the  place  of  origin  may  have 
been  far  away,  but  still  terrestrial 

Then  it's  that  other  familiar  matter  of  incredible  "marksmanship" 
again — hitting  a  small,  triangular  space  for  hours — interval  of  hours 
— then  from  nine  in  the  morning  until  night:  same  small  triangular 
space. 

These  are  the  disregards  of  the  classic  explanation.  There  is 
no  mention  of  spiders  having  been  seen  to  fall,  but  a  good  inclusion 
is  that,  though  this  substance  fell  in  good-sized  flakes  of  considerable 
weight,  it  was  viscous.  In  this  respect  it  was  like  cobwebs:  dogs 
nosing  it  on  grass,  were  blindfolded  with  it.  This  circumstance 
does  strongly  suggest  cobwebs 

Unless  we  can  accept  that,  in  regions  aloft,  there  are  vast  viscous 
or  gelatinous  areas,  and  that  things  passing  through  become  daubed. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  61 

Or  perhaps  we  dear  up  the  confusion  in  the  descriptions  of  the 
substance  that  fell  in  1841  and  1846,  in  Asia  Minor,  described  in 
one  publication  as  gelatinous,  and  in  another  as  a  cereal — that  it 
was  a  cereal  that  had  passed  through  a  gelatinous  region.  That  the 
paper-like  substance  of  Memel  may  have  had  such  an  experience 
may  be  indicated  in  that  Ehrenberg  found  in  it  gelatinous  matter, 
which  he  called  "nostoc."  (Annals  and  Mag.  of  Nat.  Hist., 

i-3-i85.) 

Scientific  American,  45-337: 

Fall  of  a  substance  described  as  "cobwebs,"  latter  part  of  October, 
1 88 1,  in  Milwaukee,  Wis.,  and  other  towns:  other  towns  mentioned 
are  Green  Bay,  Vesburge,  Fort  Howard,  Sheboygan,  and  Ozaukee. 
The  aeronautic  spiders  are  known  as  "gossamer"  spiders,  because 
of  the  extreme  lightness  of  the  filaments  that  they  cast  out  to  the 
wind.  Of  the  substance  that  fell  in  Wisconsin,  it  is  said: 

"In  all  instances  the  webs  were  strong  in  texture  and  very  white." 

The  Editor  says: 

"Curiously  enough,  there  is  no  mention  in  any  of  the  reports 
that  we  have  seen,  of  the  presence  of  spiders." 

So  our  attempt  to  divorce  a  possible  external  product  from  its 
terrestrial  merger:  then  our  joy  of  the  prospector  who  thinks  he's 
found  something: 

The  Monthly  Weather  Review,  26-566,  quotes  the  Montgomery 
(Ala.)  Advertiser: 

That,  upon  Nov.  21,  1898,  numerous  batches  of  spider-web-like 
substance  fell  in  Montgomery,  in  strands  and  in  occasional  masses 
several  inches  long  and  several  inches  broad.  According  to  the 
writer,  it  was  not  spiders'  web,  but  something  like  asbestos;  also 
that  it  was  phosphorescent. 

The  Editor  of  the  Review  says  that  he  sees  no  reason  for  doubt- 
ing that  these  masses  were  cobwebs. 

La  Nature,  1883-342: 

A  correspondent  writes  that  he  sends  a  sample  of  a  substance 
said  to  have  fallen  at  Montussan  (Gironde),  Oct.  16,  1883.  Ac- 
cording to  a  witness,  quoted  by  the  correspondent,  a  thick  cloud, 
accompanied  by  rain  and  a  violent  wind,  had  appeared.  This  cloud 
was  composed  of  a  woolly  substance  in  lumps  the  size  of  a  fist,  which 
fell  to  the  ground.  The  Editor  (Tissandier)  says  of  this  substance 
that  it  was  white,  but  was  something  that  had  been  burned.  It 
was  fibrous.  M.  Tissandier  astonishes  us  by  saying  that  he  can 
not  identify  this  substance.  We  thought  that  anything  could  be 


62  BOOK  OF  JHE  DAMNED 

'identified"  as  anything.  He  can  say  only  that  the  cloud  in  ques- 
tion must  have  been  an  extraordinary  conglomeration. 

Annual  Register,  1832-447: 

That,  March,  1832,  there  fell,  in  the  fields  of  Kourianof,  Russia, 
a  combustible  yellowish  substance,  covering,  at  least  two  inches 
thick,  an  area  of  600  or  700  square  feet.  It  was  resinous  and 
yellowish:  so  one  inclines  to  the  conventional  explanation  that  it 
was  pollen  from  pine  trees — but,  when  torn,  it  had  the  tenacity 
of  cotton.  When  placed  in  water,  it  had  the  consistency  of  resin. 
"This  resin  had  the  color  of  amber,  was  elastic,  like  India  rubber, 
and  smelled  like  prepared  oil  mixed  with  wax." 

So  in  general  our  notion  of  cargoes — and  our  notion  of  cargoes  of 
food  supplies: 

In  Philosophical  Transactions,  19-224,  is  an  extract  from  a 
letter  by  Mr.  Robert  Vans,  of  Kilkenny,  Ireland,  dated  Nov.  15, 
1695:  that  there  had  been  "of  late,"  in  the  counties  of  Limerick 
and  Tipperary,  showers  of  a  sort  of  matter  like  butter  or  grease  .  .  . 
having  "a  very  stinking  smell." 

There  follows  an  extract  from  a  letter  by  the  Bishop  of  Cloyne, 
upon  "a  very  odd  phenomenon,"  which  was  observed  in  Munster 
and  Leinster:  that  for  a  good  part  of  the  spring  of  1695  there  fell 
a  substance  which  the  country  people  called  "butter" — "soft,  clammy, 
and  of  a  dark  yellow" — that  cattle  fed  "indifferently"  in  fields  where 
this  substance  lay. 

"It  fell  in  lumps  as  big  as  the  end  of  one's  finger."  It  had  a 
"strong  ill  scent."  His  Grace  calls  it  a  "stinking  dew." 

In  Mr.  Van's  letter,  it  is  said  that  the  "butter"  was  supposed 
to  have  medicinal  properties,  and  "was  gathered  in  pots  and  other 
vessels  by  some  of  the  inhabitants  of  this  place." 

And: 

In  all  the  following  volumes  of  Philosophical  Transactions 
there  is  no  speculation  upon  this  extraordinary  subject.  Ostracism. 
The  fate  of  this  datum  is  a  good  instance  of  damnation,  not  by 
denial,  and  not  by  explaining  away,  but  by  simple  disregard.  The 
fall  is  listed  by  Chladni,  and  is  mentioned  in  other  catalogs,  but, 
from  the  absence  of  all  inquiry,  and  of  all  but  formal  mention,  we 
see  that  it  has  been  under  excommunication  as  much  as  was  ever 
anything  by  the  preceding  system.  The  datum  has  been  buried 
alive.  It  is  as  irreconcilable  with  the  modern  system  of  dogmas  as 
ever  were  geologic  strata  and  vermiform  appendix  with  the  preceding 
system 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  63 

If,  intermittently,  or  "for  a  good  part  of  the  spring,"  this  sub- 
stance fell  in  two  Irish  provinces,  and  nowhere  else,  we  have,  stronger 
than  before,  a  sense  of  a  stationary  region  overhead,  or  a  region 
that  receives  products  like  this  earth's  products,  but  from  external 
sources,  a  region  in  which  this  earth's  gravitational  and  meteoro- 
logical forces  are  relatively  inert — if  for  many  weeks  a  good  part  of 
this  substance  did  hover  before  finally  falling.  We  suppose  that,  in 
1685,  Mr.  Vans  and  the  Bishop  of  Cloyne  could  describe  what  they 
saw  as  well  as  could  witnesses  in  1885:  nevertheless,  it  is  going  far 
back;  we  shall  have  to  have  many  modern  instances  before  we  can 
accept. 

As  to  other  falls,  or  another  fall,  it  is  said  in  the  Amer.  Jour. 
Set.,  1-28-361,  that,  April  n,  1832 — about  a  month  after  the 
fall  of  the  substance  of  Kourianof — fell  a  substance  that  was  wine- 
yellow,  transparent,  soft,  and  smelling  like  rancid  oil.  M.  Herman, 
a  chemist  who  examined  it,  named  it  "sky  oil."  For  analysis  and 
chemic  reactions,  see  the  Journal.  The  Edinburgh  New  Philo- 
sophical Journal,  13-368,  mentions  an  "unctuous"  substance  that 
fell  near  Rotterdam,  in  1832.  In  Comptes  Rendus,  13-215,  there 
is  an  account  of  an  oily,  reddish  matter  that  fell  at  Genoa,  February, 
1841. 

Whatever  it  may  have  been 

Altogether,  most  of  our  difficulties  are  problems  that  we  should 
leave  to  later  developers  of  super-geography,  I  think.  A  discoverer 
of  America  should  leave  Long  Island  to  some  one  else.  If  there  be, 
plying  back  and  forth  from  Jupiter  and  Mars  and  Venus,  super- 
constructions  that  are  sometimes  wrecked,  we  think  of  fuel  as  well 
as  cargoes.  Of  course  the  most  convincing  data  would  be  of  coal 
falling  from  the  sky:  nevertheless,  one  does  suspect  that  oil-burning 
engines  were  discovered  ages  ago  in  more  advanced  worlds — but,  as 
I  say,  we  should  leave  something  to  our  disciples — so  we'll  not 
especially  wonder  whether  these  butter-like,  or  oily  substances  were 
food  or  fuel.  So  we  merely  note  that  in  the  Scientific  American, 
24-323,  is  an  account  of  hail  that  fell,  in  the  middle  of  April,  1871, 
in  Mississippi,  in  which  was  a  substance  described  as  turpentine. 

Something  that  tasted  like  orange  water,  in  hailstones,  about  the 
first  of  June,  1842,  near  Nimes,  France;  identified  as  nitric  acid 
(Jour,  de  Pharmacie,  1845-273). 

Hail  and  ashes,  in  Ireland,  1755  (Set.  Anier.,  5-168). 

That,  at  Elizabeth,  N.  J.,  June  9,  1874,  fell  hail  in  which  was  a 


64  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

substance,  said,  by  Prof.  Leeds,  of  Stevens  Institute,  to  be  carbonate 
of  soda  (Sci.  Arner.,  30-262). 

We  are  getting  a  little  away  from  the  lines  of  our  composition, 
but  it  will  be  an  important  point  later  that  so  many  extraordinary 
falls  have  occurred  with  hail.  Or — if  they  were  of  substances  that 
had  had  origin  upon  some  other  part  of  this  earth's  surface — had 
the  hail,  too,  that  origin?  Our  acceptance  here  will  depend  upon 
the  number  of  instances.  Reasonably  enough,  some  of  the  things' 
that  fall  to  this  earth  should  coincide  with  falls  of  hail. 

As  to  vegetable  substances  in  quantities  so  great  as  to  suggest  lost 
cargoes,  we  have  a  note  in  the  Intellectual  Observer,  3-468:  that, 
upon  the  first  of  May,  1863,  a  rain  fell  at  Perpignan,  "bringing 
down  with  it  a  red  substance,  which  proved  on  examination  to  be 
a  red  meal  mixed  with  fine  sand."  At  various  points  along  the 
Mediterranean,  this  substance  fell. 

There  is,  in  Philosophical  Transactions,  16-281,  an  account  of 
a  seeming  cereal,  said  to  have  fallen  hi  Wiltshire,  in  1686 — said 
that  some  of  the  "wheat"  fell  "enclosed  in  hailstones" — but  the 
writer  in  Transactions,  says  that  he  had  examined  the  grains,  and 
that  they  were  nothing  but  seeds  of  ivy  berries  dislodged  from 
holes  and  chinks  where  birds  had  hidden  them.  If  birds  still  hide 
ivy  seeds,  and  if  winds  still  blow,  I  don't  see  why  the  phenomenon 
has  not  repeated  in  more  than  two  hundred  years  since. 

Or  the  red  matter  in  rain,  at  Siena,  Italy,  May,  1830;  said,  by 
Arago,  to  have  been  vegetable  matter  (Arago,  (Euvres,  12-468). 

Somebody  should  collect  data  of  falls  at  Siena  alone. 

In  the  Monthly  Weather  Review,  29-^5,  a  correspondent 
writes  that,  upon  Feb.  16,  1901,  at  Pawpaw,  Michigan,  upon  a  day 
that  was  so  calm  that  his  windmill  did  not  run,  fell  a  brown  dust 
that  looked  like  vegetable  matter.  The  Editor  of  the  Review 
concludes  that  this  was  no  widespread  fall  from  a  tornado,  because 
it  had  been  reported  from  nowhere  else. 

Rancidness — putridity — decomposition — a  note  that  has  been 
struck  many  times.  In  a  positive  sense,  of  course,  nothing  means 
anything,  or  every  meaning  is  continuous  with  all  other  meanings: 
or  that  all  evidences  of  guilt,  for  instance,  are  just  as  good  evidences 
of  innocence — but  this  condition  seems  to  mean — things  lying  around 
among  the  stars  a  long  time.  Horrible  disaster  in  the  time  of  Julius 
Caesar;  remains  from  it  not  reaching  this  earth  till  the  time  of  the 
Bishop  of  Cloyne:  we  leave  to  later  research  the  discussion  of 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  65 

bacterial  action  and  decomposition,  and  whether  bacteria  could 
survive  in  what  we  call  space,  of  which  we  know  nothing 

Chemical  News,  35-183: 

Dr.  A.  T.  Machattie,  F.C.S.,  writes  that,  at  London,  Ontario,  Feb. 
24,  1868,  in  a  violent  storm,  fell,  with  snow,  a  dark-colored  sub- 
stance, estimated  at  500  tons,  over  a  belt  50  miles  by  10  miles.  It 
was  examined  under  a  microscope,  by  Dr.  Machattie,  who  found  it 
to  consist  mainly  of  vegetable  matter  "far  advanced  in  decompo- 
sition." The  substance  was  examined  by  Dr.  James  Adams,  of 
Glasgow,  who  gave  his  opinion  that  it  was  the  remains  of  cereals. 
Dr.  Machattie  points  out  that  for  months  before  this  fall  the 
ground  of  Canada  had  been  frozen,  so  that  in  this  case  a  more 
than  ordinarily  remote  origin  has  to  be  thought  of.  Dr.  Machattie 
thinks  of  origin  to  the  south.  "However,"  he  says,  "this  is  mere 
conjecture." 

Amer.  Jour.  Sd.,  1841-40: 

That,  March  24,  1840 — during  a  thunderstorm — at  Rajkit,  India, 
occurred  a  fall  of  grain.  It  was  reported  by  Col.  Sykes,  of  the 
British  Association. 

The  natives  were  greatly  excited — because  it  was  grain  of  a 
kind  unknown  to  them. 

Usually  comes  forward  a  scientist  who  knows  more  of  the  things 
that  natives  know  best  than  the  natives  know — but  it  so  happens 
that  the  usual  thing  was  not  done  definitely  in  this  instance: 

"The  grain  was  shown  to  some  botanists,  who  did  not  immediately 
recognize  it,  but  thought  it  to  be  either  a  spartium  or  a  vicia." 


CHAPTER  VI 

LEAD,  silver,  diamonds,  glass. 
They  sound  like  the  accursed,  but  they're  not:  they're  now 
of  the  chosen — that  is,  when  they  occur  in  metallic  or  stony  masses 
that  Science  has  recognized  as  meteorites.    We  find  that  resistance 
is  to  substances  not  so  mixed  in  or  incorporated. 

Of  accursed  data,  it  seems  to  me  that  punk  is  pretty  damnable. 
In  the  Report  of  the  British  Association,  1878-376,  there  is  men- 
tion of  a  light  chocolate-brown  substance  that  has  fallen  with 
meteorites.  No  particulars  given;  not  another  mention  anywhere 
else  that  I  can  find.  In  this  English  publication,  the  word  "punk" 
is  not  used;  the  substance  is  called  "amadou."  I  suppose,  if  the 
datum  has  anywhere  been  admitted  to  French  publications,  the 
word  "amadou"  has  been  avoided,  and  "punk"  used. 

Or  oneness  of  allness:  scientific  works  and  social  registers:  a  Gold- 
stein who  can't  get  in  as  Goldstein,  gets  in  as  Jackson. 

The  fall  of  sulphur  from  the  sky  has  been  especially  repulsive  to 
the  modern  orthodoxy — largely  because  of  its  associations  with 
the  superstitions  or  principles  of  the  preceding  orthodoxy — stories 
of  devils:  sulphurous  exhalations.  Several  writers  have  said  that 
they  have  had  this  feeling.  So  the  scientific  reactionists,  who  have 
rabidly  fought  the  preceding,  because  it  was  the  preceding:  and  the 
scientific  prudes,  who,  in  sheer  exclusionism,  have  held  lean  hands 
over  pale  eyes,  denying  falls  of  sulphur.  I  have  many  notes  upon 
the  sulphurous  odor  of  meteorites,  and  many  notes  upon  phosphor- 
escence of  things  that  come  from  externality.  Some  day  I  shall  look 
over  old  stories  of  demons  that  have  appeared  sulphurously  upon 
this  earth,  with  the  idea  of  expressing  that  we  have  often  had 
undesirable  visitors  from  other  worlds;  or  that  an  indication  of 
external  derivation  is  sulphurousness.  I  expect  some  day  to  ration- 
alize demonology,  but  just  at  present  we  are  scarcely  far  enough 
advanced  to  go  so  far  back. 

For  a  circumstantial  account  of  a  mass  of  burning  sulphur,  about 
the  size  of  a  man's  fist,  that  fell  at  Pultusk,  Poland,  Jan.  30,  1868, 

66 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  67 

upon  a  road,  where  it  was  stamped  out  by  a  crowd  of  villagers, 
see  Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1874-272. 

The  power  of  the  exclusionists  lies  in  that  in  their  stand  are 
combined  both  modern  and  archaic  systematists.  Falls  of  sand- 
stone and  limestone  are  repulsive  to  both  theologians  and  scientists. 
Sandstone  and  limestone  suggest  other  worlds  upon  which  occur 
processes  like  geological  processes;  but  limestone,  as  a  fossiliferous 
substance,  is  of  course  especially  of  the  unchosen. 

In  Science,  March  9,  1888,  we  read  of  a  block  of  limestone,  said 
to  have  fallen  near  Middleburgh,  Florida.  It  was  exhibited  at  the 
Sub-tropical  Exposition,  at  Jacksonville.  The  writer,  in  Science, 
denies  that  it  fell  from  the  sky.  His  reasoning  is: 

There  is  no  limestone  in  the  sky; 

Therefore  this  limestone  did  not  fall  from  the  sky. 

Better  reasoning  I  can  not  conceive  of — because  we  see  that  a 
final  major  premise — universal — true — would  include  all  things: 
that,  then,  would  leave  nothing  to  reason  about — so  then  that  all 
reasoning  must  be  based  upon  "something"  not  universal,  or  only  a 
phantom  intermediate  to  the  two  finalities  of  nothingness  and  all- 
ness,  or  negativeness  and  positiveness.  ^ 

La  Nature,  1890-2-127: 

Fall,  at  Pel-et-Der  (L'  Aube)  France,  June  6,  1890,  of  limestone 
pebbles.  Identified  with  limestone  at  Chateau  Landon — or  up  and 
down  in  a  whirlwind.  But  they  fell  with  hail — which,  in  June, 
could  not  very  well  be  identified  with  ice  from  Chateau-Landon. 
Coincidence,  perhaps. 

Upon  page  70,  Science  Gossip,  1887,  the  Editor  says,  of  a  stone 
that  was  reported  to  have  fallen  at  Little  Lever,  England,  that  a 
sample  had  been  sent  to  him.  It  was  sandstone.  Therefore  it 
had  not  fallen,  but  had  been  on  the  ground  in  the  first  place.  But, 
upon  page  140,  Science  Gossip,  1887,  is  an  account  of  "a  large, 
smooth,  waterworn,  gritty  sandstone  pebble"  that  had  been  found  in 
the  wood  of  a  full-grown  beech  tree.  Looks  to  me  as  if  it  had 
fallen  red-hot,  and  had  penetrated  the  tree  with  high  velocity. 
But  I  have  never  heard  of  anything  falling  red-hot  from  a 
whirlwind 

The  wood  around  this  standstone  pebble  was  black,  as  if  charred. 

Dr.  Farrington,  for  instance,  in  his  books,  does  not  even  mention 
sandstone.  However,  the  British  Association,  though  reluctant,  is 
less  exclusive:  Report  of  1860,  p.  197:  substance  about  the  size 
of  a  duck's  egg,  that  fell  at  Raphoe,  Ireland,  June  9,  1860— date 


68  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

questioned.  It  is  not  definitely  said  that  this  substance  was  sand- 
stone, but  that  it  "resembled"  friable  sandstone. 

Falls  of  salt  have  occurred  often.  They  have  been  avoided  by 
scientific  writers,  because  of  the  dictum  that  only  water  and  not 
substances  held  in  solution,  can  be  raised  by  evaporation.  How- 
ever, falls  of  salty  water  have  received  attention  from  Dalton  and 
others,  and  have  been  attributed  to  whirlwinds  from  the  sea.  This 
is  so  reasonably  contested — quasi-reasonably — as  to  places  not  far 
from  the  sea 

But  the  fall  of  salt  that  occurred  high  in  the  mountains  of  Switzer- 
land  

We  could  have  predicted  that  that  datum  could  be  found  some- 
where. Let  anything  be  explained  in  local  terms  of  the  coast  of 
England — but  also  has  it  occurred  high  in  the  mountains  of  Switz- 
erland. 

Large  crystals  of  salt  fell — in  a  hail  storm — Aug.  20,  1870,  in 
Switzerland.  The  orthodox  explanation  is  a  crime:  whoever  made 
it,  should  have  had  his  finger-prints  taken.  We  are  told  (An.  Rec. 
Sci.,  1872)  that  these  objects  of  salt  "came  over  the  Mediterranean 
from  some  part  of  Africa." 

Or  the  hypnosis  of  the  conventional — provided  it  be  glib.  One 
reads  such  an  assertion,  and  provided  it  be  suave  and  brief  and 
conventional,  one  seldom  questions — or  thinks  "very  strange"  and 
then  forgets.  One  has  an  impression  from  geography  lessons :  Medi- 
terranean not  more  than  three  inches  wide,  on  the  map ;  Switzerland 
only  a  few  more  inches  away.  These  sizable  masses  of  salt 
are  described  in  the  Ame'r.  Jour.  Sci.,  3-3-239,  as  "essentially  im- 
perfect cubic  crystals  of  common  salt."  As  to  occurrence  with 
hail — that  can  in  one,  or  ten,  or  twenty,  instances  be  called  a  coin- 
cidence. 

Another  datum:  extraordinary  year  1883: 

London  Times,  Dec.  25,  1883: 

Translation  from  a  Turkish  newspaper;  a  substance  that  fell  at 
Scutari,  Dec.  2,  1883;  described  as  an  unknown  substance,  in  par- 
ticles— or  flakes? — like  snow.  "It  was  found  to  be  saltish  to  the 
taste,  and  to  dissolve  readily  in  water." 

Miscellaneous: 

"Black,  capillary  matter"  that  fell,  Nov.  16,  1857,  at  Charleston, 
S.  C.  (Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  2-31-459). 

Fall  of  small,  friable,  vesicular  masses,  from  size  of  a  pea  to  size 
of  a  walnut,  at  Lobau,  Jan.  18,  1835  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1860-85). 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  69 

Objects  that  fell  at  Peshawur,  India,  June,  1893,  during  a  storm: 
substance  that  looked  like  crystallized  nitre,  and  that  tasted  like 
sugar  (Native,  July  13,  1893). 

I  suppose  sometimes  deep-sea  fishes  have  their  noses  bumped 
by  cinders.  If  their  regions  be  subjacent  to  Cunard  or  White  Star 
routes,  they're  especially  likely  to  be  bumped.  I  conceive  of  no 
inquiry:  they're  deep-sea  fishes. 

Or  the  slag  of  Slains.  That  it  was  a  furnace-product.  The  Rev. 
James  Rust  seemed  to  feel  bumped.  He  tried  in  vain  to  arouse 
inquiry. 

As  to  a  report,  from  Chicago,  April  9,  1879,  that  slag  had  fallen 
from  the  sky,  Prof.  E.  S.  Bastian  (Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  3-18-78) 
says  that  the  slag  "had  been  on  the  ground  in  the  first  place."  It 
was  furnace-slag.  "A  chemical  examination  of  the  specimens  has 
shown  that  they  possess  none  of  the  characteristics  of  true  meteorites.'* 

Over  and  over  and  over  again,  the  universal  delusion;  hope  and 
despair  of  attempted  positivism;  that  there  can  be  real  criteria,  or 
distinct  characteristics  of  anything.  If  anybody  can  define — not 
merely  suppose,  like  Prof.  Bastian,  that  he  can  define — the  true 
characteristics  of  anything,  or  so  localize  trueness  anywhere,  he 
makes  the  discovery  for  which  the  cosmos  is  laboring.  He  will  .be 
instantly  translated,  like  Elijah,  into  the  Positive  Absolute.  My 
own  notion  is  that,  in  a  moment  of  super-concentration,  Elijah 
became  so  nearly  a  real  prophet  that  he  was  translated  to  heaven* 
or  to  the  Positive  Absolute,  with  such  velocity  that  he  left  an  in- 
candescent train  behind  him.  As  we  go  along,  we  shall  find  the 
"true  test  of  meteoritic  material,"  which  in  the  past  has  been  taken 
as  an  absolute,  dissolving  into  almost  utmost  nebulosity.  Prof. 
Bastian  explains  mechanically,  or  in  terms  of  the  usual  reflexes  to 
all  reports  of  unwelcome  substances:  that  near  where  the  slag  had 
been  found,  telegraph  wires  had  been  struck  by  lightning;  that 
particles  of  melted  wire  had  been  seen  to  fall  near  the  slag — which 
had  been  on  the  ground  in  the  first  place.  But,  according  to  the 
N.  Y.  Times,  April  14,  1879,  about  two  bushels  of  this  substance 
had  fallen. 

Something  that  was  said  to  have  fallen  at  Darmstadt,  June  7, 
1846;  listed  by  Greg  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1867-416)  as  "only 
slag." 

Philosophical  Magazine,  4-10-381: 

That,  in  1855,  a  large  stone  was  found  far  in  the  interior  of  a 
tree,  in  Battersea  Fields. 


70  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Sometimes  cannon  balls  are  found  embedded  in  trees.  Doesn't 
seem  to  be  anything  to  discuss;  doesn't  seem  discussable  that  any 
one  would  cut  a  hole  in  a  tree  and  hide  a  cannon  ball,  which  one 
could  take  to  bed,  and  hide  under  one's  pillow,  just  as  easily.  So 
with  the  stone  of  Battersea  Fields.  What  is  there  to  say,  except 
that  it  fell  with  high  velocity  and  embedded  in  the  tree?  Never- 
theless, there  was  a  great  deal  of  discussion 

Because,  at  the  foot  of  the  tree,  as  if  broken  off  the  stone,  frag- 
ments of  slag  were  found. 

I  have  nine  other  instances. 

Slag  and  cinders  and  ashes,  and  you  won't  believe,  and  neither 
will  I,  that  they  came  from  the  furnaces  of  vast  aerial  super- 
constructions.  We'll  see  what  looks  acceptable. 

As  to  ashes,  the  difficulties  are  great,  because  we'd  expect  many 
falls  of  terrestrially  derived  ashes — volcanoes  and  forest  fires. 

In  some  of  our  acceptances,  I  have  felt  a  little  radical 

I  suppose  that  one  of  our  main  motives  is  to  show  that  there 
is,  in  quasi-existence,  nothing  but  the  preposterous — or  something 
intermediate  to  absolute  preposterousness  and  final  reasonableness — 
that  the  new  is  the  obviously  preposterous;  that  it  becomes  the 
established  and  disguisedly  preposterous;  that  it  is  displaced,  after 
a  while,  and  is  again  seen  to  be  the  preposterous.  Or  that  all  prog- 
ress is  from  the  outrageous  to  the  academic  or  sanctified,  and  back 
to  the  outrageous — modified,  however,  by  a  trend  of  higher  and 
higher  approximation  to  the  impreposterous.  Sometimes  I  feel  a 
little  more  uninspired  than  at  other  times,  but  I  think  we're  pretty 
well  accustomed  now  to  the  oneness  of  allness;  or  that  the  methods 
of  science  in  maintaining  its  system  are  as  outrageous  as  the  attempts 
of  the  damned  to  break  in.  In  the  Annual  Record  of  Science, 
1875-241,  Prof.  Daubree  is  quoted:  that  ashes  that  had  fallen  in 
the  Azores  had  come  from  the  Chicago  fire 

Or  the  damned  and  the  saved,  and  there's  little  to  choose  between 
them;  and  angels  are  beings  that  have  not  obviously  barbed  tails 
to  them — or  never  have  such  bad  manners  as  to  stroke  an  angel 
below  the  waist-line. 

However  this  especial  outrage  was  challenged:  the  Editor  of  the 
Record  returns  to  it,  in  the  issue  of  1876:  considers  it  "in  the 
highest  degree  improper  to  say  that  the  ashes  of  Chicago  were  landed 
in  the  Azores." 

Bull.  Soc.  Astro,  de  France,  22-245: 

Account  of  a  white  substance,  like  ashes,  that  fell  at  Annoy, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  71 

France,  March  27,  1908:  simply  called  a  curious  phenomenon;  no 
attempt  to  trace  to  a  terrestrial  source. 

Flake  formations,  which  may  signify  passage  through  a  region  of 
pressure,  are  common;  but  spherical  formations — as  if  of  things 
that  have  rolled  and  rolled  along  planar  regions  somewhere — are 
commoner: 

Nature,  Jan.  10,  1884,  quotes  a  Kimberly  newspaper: 

That,  toward  the  close  of  November,  1883,  a  thick  shower  of 
ashy  matter  fell  at  Queenstown,  South  Africa.  The  matter  was  in 
marble-sized  balls,  which  were  soft  and  pulpy,  but  which,  upon 
drying,  crumbled  at  touch.  The  shower  was  confined  to  one  nar- 
row streak  of  land.  It  would  be  only  ordinarily  preposterous  to 
attribute  this  substance  to  Krakatoa 

But,  with  the  fall,  loud  noises  were  heard 

But  I'll  omit  many  notes  upon  ashes:  if  ashes  should  sift  down 
upon  deep-sea  fishes,  that  is  not  to  say  that  they  came  from 
steamships. 

Data  of  falls  of  cinders  have  been  especially  damned  by  Mr. 
Symons,  the  meteorologist,  some  of  whose  investigations  we'll  in- 
vestigate later — nevertheless 

Notice  of  a  fall,  in  Victoria,  Australia,  April  14,  1875  (Kept. 
Brit.  Assoc.,  1875-242) — at  least  we  are  told,  in  the  reluctant  way, 
that  some  one  "thought"  he  saw  matter  fall  near  him  at  night, 
and  the  next  day  found  something  that  looked  like  cinders. 

In  the  Proc.  of  the  London  Roy.  Soc.,  19-122,  there  is  an 
account  of  cinders  that  fell  on  the  deck  of  a  lightship,  Jan.  9,  1873. 
In  the  Amer.  Jour.  Set.,  2-24-449,  there  is  a  notice  that  the  Editor 
had  received  a  specimen  of  cinders  said  to  have  fallen — in  showery 
weather — upon  a  farm,  near  Ottowa,  EL,  Jan.  17,  1857. 

But  after  all,  ambiguous  things  they  are,  cinders  or  ashes  or  slag 
or  clinkers,  the  high  priest  of  the  accursed  that  must  speak  aloud 
for  us  is — coal  that  has  fallen  from  the  sky. 

Or  coke: 

The  person  who  thought  he  saw  something  like  cinders,  also 
thought  he  saw  something  like  coke,  we  are  told. 

N attire,  36-119: 

Something  that  "looked  exactly  like  coke"  that  fell — during  a 
thunder  storm — in  the  Orne,  France,  April  24,  1887. 

Or  charcoal: 

Dr.  Angus  Smith,  in  the  Lit.  and  PhU.  Soc.  of  Manchester 
Memoirs,  2-9-146,  says  that,  about  1827 — like  a  great  deal  in 


72  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Lyell's  Principles  and  Darwin's  Origin,  this  account  is  from 
hearsay — something  fell  from  the  sky,  near  Allport,  England.  It 
fell  luminously,  with  a  loud  report,  and  scattered  in  a  field.  A 
fragment  that  was  seen  by  Dr.  Smith,  is  described  by  him  as  having 
"the  appearance  of  a  piece  of  common  wood  charcoal. "  Neverthe- 
less, the  reassured  feeling  of  the  faithful,  upon  reading  this,  is  bur- 
dened with  data  of  differences:  the  substance  was  so  uncommonly 
heavy  that  it  seemed  as  if  it  had  iron  in  it;  also  there  was  "a 
sprinkling  of  sulphur."  This  material  is  said,  by  Prof.  Baden- 
Powell,  to  be  "totally  unlike  that  of  any  other  meteorite."  Greg, 
in  his  catalogue  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1860-73)  calls  it  "a  more 
than  doubtful  substance" — but  again,  against  reassurance,  that  is 
not  doubt  of  authenticity.  Greg  says  that  it  is  like  compact  char- 
coal, with  particles  of  sulphur  and  iron  pyrites  embedded. 

Reassurance  rises  again: 

Prof.  Baden-Powell  says:  "It  contains  also  charcoal,  which  might 
perhaps  be  acquired  from  matter  among  which  it  fell." 

This  is  a  common  reflex  with  the  exclusionists:  that  substances 
not  "truly  meteoritic"  did  not  fall  from  the  sky,  but  were  picked 
up  by  "truly  meteoritic"  things,  of  course  only  on  their  surfaces,  by 
impact  with  this  earth. 

Rhythm  of  reassurances  and  their  declines: 

According  to  Dr.  Smith,  this  substance  was  not  merely  coated 
with  charcoal;  his  analysis  gives  43.59  per  cent  carbon. 

Our  acceptance  that  coal  has  fallen  from  the  sky  will  be  via 
data  of  resinous  substances  and  bituminous  substances,  which  merge 
so  that  they  can  not  be  told  apart. 

Resinous  substance  said  to  have  fallen  at  Kaba,  Hungary,  April 
15,  1887  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1860-94). 

A  resinous  substance  that  fell  after  a  fireball?  at  Neuhaus,  Bohe- 
mia, Dec.  17,  1824  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1860-70). 

Fall,  July  28,  1885,  at  Luchon,  during  a  storm,  of  a  brownish 
substance;  very  friable,  carbonaceous  matter;  when  burned  it  gave 
out  a  resinous  odor  (Comptes  Rendus,  103-837). 

Substance  that  fell,  Feb.  17,  18,  19,  1841,  at  Genoa,  Italy,  said 
to  have  been  resinous;  said  by  Arago  ((Euvres,  12-469)  to  have 
been  bituminous  matter  and  sand. 

Fall — during  a  thunderstorm — July,  1681,  near  Cape  Cod,  upon 
the  deck  of  an  English  vessel,  the  Albemarle,  of  "burning,  bitu- 
minous matter"  (Edin.  New  Phil.  Jour.,  26-86);  a  fall,  at  Chris- 
tiania,  Norway,  June  13,  1822,  of  bituminous  matter,  listed  by  Greg 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  73 

as  doubtful;  fall  of  bituminous  matter,  in  Germany,  March  8,  1798, 
listed  by  Greg.  Lockyer  (The  Meteoric  Hypothesis,  p.  24)  says 
that  the  substance  that  fell  at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  Oct.  13,  1838 
— about  five  cubic  feet  of  it:  substance  so  soft  that  it  was  cuttable 
with  a  knife — "after  being  experimented  upon,  it  left  a  residue, 
which  gave  out  a  very  bituminous  smell." 

And  this  inclusion  of  Lockyer's — so  far  as  findable  in  all  books 
that  I  have  read — is,  in  books,  about  as  close  as  we  can  get  to 
our  desideratum — that  coal  has  fallen  from  the  sky.  Dr.  Farrington, 
except  with  a  brief  mention,  ignores  the  whole  subject  of  the  fall 
of  carbonaceous  matter  from  the  sky.  Proctor,  in  all  of  his  books 
that  I  have  read — is,  in  books,  about  as  close  as  we  can  get  to 
duction  to  the  Study  of  Meteorites,"  p.  53)  excommunicates  with 
the  admission  that  carbonaceous  matter  has  been  found  in  meteor- 
ites "in  very  minute  quantities" — or  my  own  suspicion  is  that  it  is 
possible  to  damn  something  else  only  by  losing  one's  own  soul — 
quasi-soul,  of  course. 

Sci.  Amer.,  35-120: 

That  the  substance  that  fell  at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  "re- 
sembled a  piece  of  anthracite  coal  more  than  anything  else." 

It's  a  mistake,  I  think:  the  resemblance  is  to  bituminous  coal — 
but  it  is  from  the  periodicals  that  we  must  get  our  data.  To 
the  writers  of  books  upon  meteorites,  it  would  be  as  wicked — by 
which  we  mean  departure  from  the  characters  of  an  established  spe- 
cies— quasi-established,  of  course — to  say  that  coal  has  fallen  from 
the  sky,  as  would  be,  to  something  in  a  barnyard,  a  temptation  that 
it  climb  a  tree  and  catch  a  bird.  Domestic  things  in  a  barnyard: 
and  how  wild  things  from  forests  outside  seem  to  them.  Or  the 
homeopathist — but  we  shall  shovel  data  of  coal. 

And,  if  over  and  over,  we  shall  learn  of  masses  of  soft  coal  that 
have  fallen  upon  this  earth,  if  in  no  instance  has  it  been  asserted  that 
the  masses  did  not  fall,  but  were  upon  the  ground  in  the  first  place; 
if  we  have  many  instances,  this  time  we  turn  down  good  and  hard 
the  mechanical  reflex  that  these  masses  were  carried  from  one 
place  to  another  in  whirlwinds,  because  we  find  it  too  difficult  to 
accept  that  whirlwinds  could  so  select,  or  so  specialize  in  a  peculiar 
substance.  Among  writers  of  books,  the  only  one  I  know  of  who 
makes  more  than  brief  mention  is  Sir  Robert  Ball.  He  represents 
a  still  more  antique  orthodoxy,  or  is  an  exclusionist  of  the  old  type, 
still  holding  out  against  even  meteorites.  He  cites  several  falls  of 
carbonaceous  matter,  but  with  disregards  that  make  for  reasonable- 


74  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

ness  that  earthy  matter  may  have  been  caught  up  by  whirlwinds 
and  flung  down  somewhere  else.  If  he  had  given  a  full  list,  he 
would  be  called  upon  to  explain  the  special  affinity  of  whirlwinds 
for  a  special  kind  of  coal.  He  does  not  give  a  full  list.  We  shall 
have  all  that's  findable,  and  we  shall  see  that  against  this  disease 
we're  writing,  the  homeopathist's  prescription  availeth  not.  An- 
other exclusionist  was  Prof.  Lawrence  Smith.  His  psycho-tropism 
was  to  respond  to  all  reports  of  carbonaceous  matter  falling  from 
the  sky,  by  saying  that  this  damned  matter  had  been  deposited  upon 
things  of  the  chosen  by  impact  with  this  earth.  Most  of  our  data 
antedate  him,  or  were  contemporaneous  with  him,  or  were  as  access- 
ible to  him  as  to  us.  In  his  attempted  positivism  it  is  simply — and 
beautifully — disregarded  that,  according  to  Berthelot,  Berzelius, 
Cloez,  Wohler  and  others  these  masses  are  not  merely  coated  with 
carbonaceous  matter,  but  are  carbonaceous  throughout,  or  are  per- 
meated throughout.  How  any  one  could  so  resolutely  and  dogmat- 
ically and  beautifully  and  blindly  hold  out,  would  puzzle  us  were  it 
not  for  our  acceptance  that  only  to  think  is  to  exclude  and  include; 
and  to  exclude  some  things  that  have  as  much  right  to  come  in  as 
have  the  included — that  to  have  an  opinion  upon  any  subject  is  to  be 
a  Lawrence  Smith — because  there  is  no  definite  subject. 

Dr.  Walter  Flight  (Eclectic  Magazine,  89-71)  says,  of  the  sub- 
stance that  fell  near  Alais,  France,  March  15,  1806,  that  it  "emits 
a  faint  bituminous  substance"  when  heated,  according  to  the  obser- 
vations of  Berzelius  and  a  commission  appointed  by  the  French 
Academy.  This  time  we  have  not  the  reluctances  expressed  in  such 
words  as  "like"  and  "resembling."  We  are  told  that  this  substance 
is  "an  earthy  kind  of  coal." 

As  to  "minute  quantities"  we  are  told  that  the  substance  that  fell 
at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  has  in  it  a  little  more  than  a  quar- 
ter of  organic  matter,  which,  in  alcohol,  gives  the  familiar  reaction 
of  yellow,  resinous  matter.  Other  instances  given  by  Dr.  Flight 
are: 

Carbonaceous  matter  that  fell  in  1840,  in  Tennessee;  Cranbourne, 
Australia,  1861;  Montauban,  France,  May  14,  1864  (twenty  masses, 
some  of  them  as  large  as  a  human  head;  of  a  substance  that  "re- 
sembled a  dull-colored  earthy  lignite") ;  Goalpara,  India,  about  1867 
(about  8  per  cent  of  a  hydrocarbon);  at  Ornans,  France,  July  n, 
1868;  substance  with  "an  organic,  combustible  ingredient,"  at 
Hessle,  Sweden,  Jan.  i,  1860. 

Knowledge,  4-134: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  75 

That,  according  to  M.  Daubree,  the  substance  that  had  fallen  in 
the  Argentine  Republic,  "resembled  certain  kinds  of  lignite  and 
boghead  coal."  In  Comptes  Rendus,  96-1764,  it  is  said  that  this 
mass  fell,  June  30,  1880,  in  the  province  Entre  Rios,  Argentina:  that 
it  is  "like"  brown  coal;  that  it  resembles  all  the  other  carbonaceous 
masses  that  have  fallen  from  the  sky. 

Something  that  fell  at  Grazac,  France,  Aug.  10,  1885:  when 
burned,  it  gave  out  a  bituminous  odor  (Comptes  Rendus,  104-1771). 

Carbonaceous  substance  that  fell  at  Rajpunta,  India,  Jan.  22, 
1911:  very  friable:  50  per  cent  of  it  soluble  in  water  (Records  Geol. 
Survey  of  India,  44-pt.  1-41). 

A  combustible  carbonaceous  substance  that  fell  with  sand  at 
Naples,  March  14,  1818  (Amer.  Jour.  Set.,  1-1-309). 

Sci.  Amer.  Sup.,  29-11798: 

That,  June  9,  1889,  a  very  friable  substance,  of  a  deep,  greenish 
black,  fell  at  Mighei,  Russia.  It  contained  5  per  cent  organic  mat- 
ter, which,  when  powdered  and  digested  in  alcohol,  yielded,  after 
evaporation,  a  bright  yellow  resin.  In  this  mass  was  2  per  cent  of 
an  unknown  mineral. 

Cinders  and  ashes  and  slag  and  coke  and  charcoal  and  coal. 

And  the  things  that  sometimes  deep-sea  fishes  are  bumped  by. 

Reluctances  and  the  disguises  or  covered  retreats  of  such  words 
as  "like"  and  "resemble" — or  that  conditions  of  Intermediateness 
forbid  abrupt  transitions — but  that  the  spirit  animating  all  Interme- 
diateness is  to  achieve  abrupt  transitions — because,  if  anything  could 
finally  break  away  from  its  origin  and  environment,  that  would  be 
a  real  thing — something  not  merging  away  indistinguishably  with 
the  surrounding.  So  all  attempt  to  be  original;  all  attempt  to  invent 
something  that  is  more  than  mere  extension  or  modification  of  the 
preceding,  is  positivism — or  that  if  one  could  conceive  of  a  device  to 
catch  flies,  positively  different  from,  or  unrelated  to,  all  other  devices 
— up  he'd  shoot  to  heaven,  or  the  Positive  Absolute — leaving  behind 
such  an  incandescent  train  that  in  one  age  it  would  be  said  that  he 
had  gone  aloft  in  a  fiery  chariot,  and  in  another  age  that  he  had 
been  struck  by  lightning 

I'm  collecting  notes  upon  persons  supposed  to  have  been  struck 
by  lightning.  I  think  that  high  approximation  to  positivism  has 
often  been  achieved — instantaneous  translation — residue  of  nega- 
tiveness  left  behind,  looking  much  like  effects  of  a  stroke  of  lightning. 
Some  day  I  shall  tell  the  story  of  the  Marie  Celeste— "properly," 


76  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

as  the  Scientific  American  Supplement  would  say — mysterious  dis- 
appearance of  a  sea  captain,  his  family,  and  the  crew 

Of  positivists,  by  the  route  of  Abrupt  Transition,  I  think  that 
Manet  was  notable — but  that  his  approximation  was  held  down  by 
his  intense  relativity  to  the  public — or  that  it  is  quite  as  impositive 
to  flout  and  insult  and  defy  as  it  is  to  crawl  and  placate.  Of  course, 
Manet  began  with  continuity  with  Courbet  and  others,  and  then, 
between  him  and  Monet  there  were  mutual  influences — but  the 
spirit  of  abrupt  difference  is  the  spirit  of  positivism,  and  Manet's 
stand  was  against  the  dictum  that  all  lights  and  shades  must  merge 
away  suavely  into  one  another  and  prepare  for  one  another.  So  a 
biologist  like  De  Vries  represents  positivism,  or  the  breaking  of 
Continuity,  by  trying  to  conceive  of  evolution  by  mutation — against 
the  dogma  of  indistinguishable  gradations  by  "minute  variations." 
A  Copernicus  conceives  of  helio-centricity.  Continuity  is  against 
him.  He  is  not  permitted  to  break  abruptly  with  the  past.  He 
is  permitted  to  publish  his  work,  but  only  as  "an  interesting 
hypothesis." 

Continuity — and  that  all  fhat  we  call  evolution  or  progress  is 
attempt  to  break  away  from  it 

That  our  whole  solar  system  was  at  one  time  attempt  by  planets 
to  break  away  from  a  parental  nexus  and  set  up  as  individualities, 
and,  failing,  move  in  quasi-regular  orbits  that  are  expressions  of 
relations  with  the  sun  and  with  one  another,  all  having  surrendered, 
being  now  quasi-incorporated  in  a  higher  approximation  to  system; 

Intermediateness  in  its  mineralogic  aspect  of  positivism — or  Iron 
that  strove  to  break  away  from  Sulphur  and  Oxygen,  and  be  real, 
homogeneous  Iron — failing,  inasmuch  as  elemental  iron  exists  only 
in  text-book  chemistry; 

Intermediateness  in  its  biologic  aspect  of  positivism — or  the 
wild,  fantastic,  grotesque,  monstrous  things  it  conceived  of,  some- 
times in  a  frenzy  of  effort  to  break  away  abruptly  from  all  preceding 
types — but  failing,  in  the  giraffe-effort,  for  instance,  or  only  carica- 
turing an  antelope 

All  things  break  one  relation  only  by  the  establishing  of  some 
other  relation 

All  things  cut  an  umbilical  cord  only  to  clutch  a  breast. 

So  the  fight  of  the  exclusionists  to  maintain  the  traditional — or  to 
prevent  abrupt  transition  from  the  quasi-established — fighting  so" 
that  here,  more  than  a  century  after  meteorites  were  included,  no 
other  notable  inclusion  has  been  made,  except  that  of  cosmic  dust, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  77 

data  of  which  Nordenskiold  made  more  nearly  real  than  data  in 
opposition. 

So  Proctor,  for  instance,  fought  and  expressed  his  feeling  of  the 
preposterous,  against  Sir  W.  H.  Thomson's  notions  of  arrival  upon 
this  earth  of  organisms  on  meteorites 

"I  can  only  regard  it  as  a  jest"  (Knowledge,  1-302). 

Or  that  there  is  nothing  but  jest — or  something  intermediate  to 
jest  and  tragedy; 

That  ours  is  not  an  existence  but  an  utterance; 

That  Momus  is  imagining  us  for  the  amusement  of  the  gods,  often 
with  such  success  that  some  of  us  seem  almost  alive — like  characters 
in  something  a  novelist  is  writing;  which  often  to  considerable  degree 
take  their  affairs  away  from  the  novelist 

That  Momus  is  imagining  us  and  our  arts  and  sciences  and  re- 
ligions, and  is  narrating  or  picturing  us  as  a  satire  upon  the  gods' 
real  existence. 

Because — with  many  of  our  data  of  coal  that  has  fallen  from  the 
sky  as  accessible  then  as  they  are  now,  and  with  the  scientific 
pronouncement  that  coal  is  fossil,  how,  in  a  real  existence,  by  which 
we  mean  a  consistent  existence,  or  a  state  in  which  there  is  real 
intelligence,  or  a  form  of  thinking  that  does  not  indistinguishably 
merge  away  with  imbecility,  could  there  have  been  such  a  row  as 
that  which  was  raised  about  forty  years  ago  over  Dr.  Hahn's 
announcement  that  he  had  found  fossils  in  meteorites? 

Accessible  to  anybody  at  that  time: 

Philosophical  Magazine,  4-17-425: 

That  the  substance  that  fell  at  Kaba,  Hungary,  April  15,  1857, 
contained  organic  matter  "analagous  to  fossil  waxes." 

Or  limestone: 

Of  the  block  of  limestone  which  was  reported  to  have  fallen  at 
Midleburgh,  Florida,  it  is  said  (Science,  11-118)  that,  though 
something  had  been  seen  to  fall  in  "an  old  cultivated  field,"  the 
witnesses  who  ran  to  it  picked  up  something  that  "had  been  upon 
the  ground  in  the  first  place."  The  writer  who  tells  us  this,  with 
the  usual  exclusion-imagination,  known  as  stupidity,  but  unjustly, 
because  there  is  no  real  stupidity,  thinks  he  can  think  of  a  good- 
sized  stone  that  had  for  many  years  been  in  a  cultivated  field,  but 
that  had  never  been  seen  before — had  never  interfered  with  plowing, 
for  instance.  He  is  earnest  and  unjarred  when  he  writes  that  this 
stone  weighs  200  pounds.  My  own  notion,  founded  upon  my  own 
experience  in  seeing,  is  that  a  block  of  stone  weighing  500  pounds 


78  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

might  be  in  one's  parlor  twenty  years,  virtually  unseen — but  not 
in  an  old  cultivated  field,  where  it  interfered  with  plowing — not 
anywhere — if  it  interfered. 

Dr.  Hahn  said  that  he  had  found  fossils  in  meteorites.  There  is 
a  description  of  the  corals,  sponges,  shells,  and  crinoids,  all  of  them 
microscopic,  which  he  photographed,  in  Popular  Science,  20-83. 

Dr.  Hahn  was  a  well-known  scientist.  He  was  better  known 
after  that. 

Anybody  may  theorize  upon  other  worlds  and  conditions  upon 
them  that  are  similar  to  our  own  conditions:  if  his  notions  be  pre- 
sented undisguisedly  as  fiction,  or  only  as  an  "interesting  hypothe- 
sis," he'll  stir  up  no  prude  rages. 

But  Dr.  Hahn  said  definitely  that  he  had  found  fossils  in  specified 
meteorites:  also  he  published  photographs  of  them.  His  book  is 
in  the  New  York  Public  Library.  In  the  reproductions  every  fea- 
ture of  some  of  the  little  shells  is  plainly  marked.  If  they're  not 
shells,  neither  are  things  under  an  oyster-counter.  The  striations 
are  very  plain:  one  sees  even  the  hinges  where  bivalves  are  joined. 

Prof.  Lawrence  Smith  (Knowledge,  1-258): 

"Dr.  Hahn  is  a  kind  of  half-insane  man,  whose  imagination  has 
run  away  with  him." 

Conservation  of  Continuity. 

Then  Dr.  Weinland  examined  Dr.  Hahn's  specimens.  He  gave 
his  opinion  that  they  are  fossils  and  that  they  are  not  crystals  of 
enstatite,  as  asserted  by  Prof.  Smith,  who  had  never  seen  them. 

The  damnation  of  denial  and  the  damnation  of  disregard: 

After  the  publication  of  Dr.  Weinland 's  findings — silence. 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  living  things  that  have  come  down  to  this  earth: 
Attempts  to  preserve  the  system: 

That  small  frogs  and  toads,  for  instance,  never  have  fallen  from 
the  sky,  but  were  — "on  the  ground,  in  the  first  place";  or  that  there 
have  been  such  falls — "up  from  one  place  in  a  whirlwind,  and 
down  in  another." 

Were  there  some  especially  froggy  place  near  Europe,  as  there  is 
an  especially  sandy  place,  the  scientific  explanation  would  of  course 
be  that  all  small  frogs  falling  from  the  sky  in  Europe,  come  from 
that  center  of  frogeity. 

To  start  with,  I'd  like  to  emphasize  something  that  I  am  permitted 
to  see  because  I  am  still  primitive  or  intelligent  or  in  a  state  of 
maladjustment: 

That  there  is  not  one  report  findable  of  a  fall  of  tadpoles  from 
the  sky. 

As  to  "there  in  the  first  place": 

See  Leisure  Hours,  3-779,  for  accounts  of  small  frogs,  or  toads, 
said  to  have  been  seen  to  fall  from  the  sky.  The  writer  says  that 
all  observers  were  mistaken:  that  the  frogs  or  toads  must  have 
fallen  from  trees  or  other  places  overhead. 

Tremendous  number  of  little  toads,  one  or  two  months  old,  that 
were  seen  to  fall  from  a  great  thick  cloud  that  appeared  suddenly 
in  a  sky  that  had  been  cloudless,  August,  1804,  near  Toulouse, 
France,  according  to  a  letter  from  Prof.  Pontus  to  M.  Arrago. 
(Comptes  Rendus,  3-54.) 

Many  instances  of  frogs  that  were  seen  to  fall  from  the  sky. 
("Notes  and  Queries,"  8-6-104) ;  accounts  of  such  falls,  signed  by 
witnesses.  ("Notes  and  Queries,"  8-6-190.) 

Scientific  American,  July  12,  1873: 

"A  shower  of  frogs  which  darkened  the  air  and  covered  the  ground 
for  a  long  distance  is  the  reported  result  of  a  recent  rainstorm  at 
Kansas  City,  Mo." 

As  to  having  been  there  "in  the  first  place": 

79 


o  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

f 

Little  frogs  found  in  London,  after  a  heavy  storm,  July  30,  1838. 

(Notes  and  Queries,  8-7-437) ; 
Little  toads  found  in  a  desert,  after  a  rainfall  (Notes  and  Qtteries, 

8-8-493). 

To  start  with  I  do  not  deny — positively — the  conventional  ex- 
planation of  "up  and  down."  I  think  that  there  may  have  been 
such  occurrences.  I  omit  many  notes  that  I  have  upon  indistin- 
guishables.  In  the  London  Times,  July  4,  1883,  there  is  an  ac- 
count of  a  shower  of  twigs  and  leaves  and  tiny  toads  in  a  storm 
upon  the  slopes  of  the  Apennines.  These  may  have  been  the  ejecta- 
menta  of  a  whirlwind.  I  add,  however,  that  I  have  notes  upon  two 
other  falls  of  tiny  toads,  in  1883,  one  in  France  and  one  in  Tahiti^ 
also  of  fish  in  Scotland.  But  in  the  phenomenon  of  the  Apennines, 
the  mixture  seems  to  me  to  be  typical  of  the  products  of  a  whirl- 
wind. The  other  instances  seem  to  me  to  be  typical  of — some- 
thing like  migration?  Their  great  numbers  and  their  homogeneity. 
Over  and  over  in  these  annals  of  the  damned  occurs  the  datum  of 
segregation.  But  a  whirlwind  is  thought  of  as  a  condition  of 
chaos — quasi-chaos:  not  final  negativeness,  of  course 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  July,  1881: 

"A  small  pond  in  the  track  of  the  cloud  was  sucked  dry,  the  water 
being  carried  over  the  adjoining  fields  together  with  a  large  quantity 
of  soft  mud,  which  was  scattered  over  the  ground  for  half  a  mile 
around." 

It  is  so  easy  to  say  that  small  frogs  that  have  fallen  from  the 
sky  had  been  scooped  up  by  a  whirlwind;  but  here  are  the  circum- 
stances of  a  scoop;  in  the  exclusionist-imagiration  there  is  no  re- 
gard for  mud,  debris  from  the  bottom  of  a  pond,  floating  vegeta- 
tion, loose  things  from  the  shores — but  a  precise  picking  out  of 
frogs  only.  Of  all  instances  I  have  that  attribute  the  fall  of  small 
frogs  or  toads  to  whirlwinds,  only  one  definitely  identifies  or  places 
the  whirlwind.  Also,  as  has  been  said  before,  a  pond  going  up 
would  be  quite  as  interesting  as  frogs  coming  down.  Whirlwinds 
we  read  of  over  and  over — but  where  and  what  whirlwind?  It  seems 
to  me  that  anybody  who  had  lost  a  pond  would  be  heard  from.  In 
Symons'  Meteorological  Magazine,  32-106,  a  fall  of  small  frogs, 
near  Birmingham,  June  30,  1892,  is  attributed  to  a  specific  whirl- 
wind— but  not  a  word  as  to  any  special  pond  that  had  contributed. 
And  something  that  strikes  my  attention  here  is  that  these  frogs 
are  described  as  almost  white. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  81 

Fm  afraid  there  is  no  escape  for  us:  we  shall  have  to  give  to 
civilization  upon  this  earth — some  new  worlds. 

Places  with  white  frogs  in  them. 

Upon  several  occasions  we  have  had  data  of  unknown  things  that 
have  fallen  from — somewhere.  But  something  not  to  be  overlooked 
is  that  if  living  things  have  landed  alive  upon  this  earth — in  spite 
of  all  we  think  we  know  of  the  accelerative  velocity  of  falling  bodies 
— and  have  propagated — why  the  exotic  becomes  the  indigenous, 
or  from  the  strangest  of  places  we'd  expect  the  familiar.  Or  if 
hosts  of  living  frogs  have  come  here — from  somewhere  else — every 
living  thing  upon  this  earth  may,  ancestrally,  have  come  from — 
somewhere  else. 

I  find  that  I  have  another  note  upon  a  specific  hurricane: 

Annals  and  Mag.  of  Nat.  Hist.,  1-3-185: 

After  one  of  the  greatest  hurricanes  in  the  history  of  Ireland, 
some  fish  were  found  "as  far  as  15  yards  from  the  edge  of  a  lake." 

Have  another:  this  is  a  good  one  for  the  exclusionists: 

Fall  of  fish  in  Paris:  said  that  a  neighboring  pond  had  been 
blown  dry.  (Living  Age,  52-186.)  Date  not  given,  but  I  have 
seen  it  recorded  somewhere  else. 

The  best  known  fall  of  fishes  from  the  sky  is  that  which  occurred 
at  Mountain  Ash,  in  the  Valley  of  Abedare,  Glamorganshire,  Feb. 
n,  1859. 

The  Editor  of  the  Zoologist,  2-677,  having  published  a  report  of 
a  fall  of  fishes,  writes:  "I  am  continually  receiving  similar  ac- 
counts of  frogs  and  fishes."  But,  in  all  the  volumes  of  the  Zoolog- 
ist, I  can  find  only  two  reports  of  such  falls.  There  is  nothing  to 
conclude  other  than  that  hosts  of  data  have  been  lost  because  ortho- 
doxy does  not  look  favorably  upon  such  reports.  The  Monthly 
Weather  Review  records  several  falls  of  fishes  in  the  United  States; 
but  accounts  of  these  reported  occurrences  are  not  findable  in  other 
American  publications.  Nevertheless,  the  treatment  by  the  Zoolog- 
ist, of  the  fall  reported  from  Mountain  Ash  is  fair.  First  appears, 
in  the  issue  of  1859-6493,  a  letter  from  the  Rev.  John  Griffith,  Vicar 
of  Abedare,  asserting  that  the  fall  had  occurred,  chiefly  upon  the 
property  of  Mr.  Nixon,  of  Mounta  \  Ash.  Upon  page  6540,  Dr. 
Gray,  of  the  British  Museum,  br  .  ling  with  exclusionism,  writes 
that  some  of  these  fishes,  which  ad  been  sent  to  him  alive,  were 
"very  young  minnows."  He  sa  :  "On  reading  the  evidence,  it 
seems  to  me  most  probably  only  a  practical  joke:  that  one  of  Mr. 
Nixon's  employees  had  thrown  i  pailful  of  water  upon  another, 


82  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

who  had  thought  fish  in  it  had  fallen  from  the  sky" — had  dipped 
up  a  pailful  from  a  brook. 

Those  fishes — still  alive — were  exhibited  at  the  Zoological  Gar- 
dens, Regent's  Park.  The  Editor  says  that  one  was  a  minnow  and 
that  the  rest  were  sticklebacks. 

He  says  that  Dr.  Gray's  explanation  is  no  doubt  right. 

But,  upon  page  6564,  he  publishes  a  letter  from  another  corre- 
spondent, who  apologizes  for  opposing  "so  high  an  authority  as  Dr. 
Gray/'  but  says  that  he  had  obtained  some  of  these  fishes  from 
persons  who  lived  at  a  considerable  distance  apart,  or  considerably 
out  of  range  of  the  playful  pail  of  water. 

According  to  the  Annual  Register,  1859-14,  the  fishes  them- 
selves had  fallen  by  pailfuls. 

If  these  fishes  were  not  upon  the  ground  in  the  first  place,  we 
base  our  objections  to  the  whirlwind  explanation,  upon  two  data: 

That  they  fell  in  no  such  distribution  as  one  could  attribute  to 
the  discharge  of  a  whirlwind,  but  upon  a  narrow  strip  of  land:  about 
80  yards  long  and  12  yards  wide 

The  other  datum  is  again  the  suggestion  that  at  first  seemed  so 
incredible,  but  for  which  support  is  piling  up,  a  suggestion  of  a 
stationary  source  overhead 

That  ten  minutes  later  another  fall  of  fishes  occurred  upon  this 
same  narrow  strip  of  land. 

Even  arguing  that  a  whirlwind  may  stand  still  axially,  it  dis- 
charges tangentially.  Wherever  the  fishes  came  from  it  does  not 
seem  thinkable  that  some  could  have  fallen  and  that  others  could 
have  whirled  even  a  tenth  of  a  minute,  then  falling  directly  after 
the  first  to  fall.  Because  of  these  evil  circumstances  the  best  adap- 
tation was  to  laugh  the  whole  thing  off  and  say  that  some  one  had 
soused  some  one  else  with  a  pailful  of  water,  in  which  a  few  "very 
young"  minnows  had  been  caught  up. 

In  the  London  Times,  March  2,  1859,  is  a  letter  from  Mr.  Aaron 
Roberts,  curate  of  St.  Peter's,  Carmathon.  In  this  letter  the  fishes 
are  said  to  have  been  about  four  inches  long,  but  there  is  some 
question  of  species.  I  think,  myself,  that  they  were  minnows  and 
sticklebacks.  Some  persons,  thinking  them  to  be  sea  fishes,  placed 
them  in  salt  water,  according  tn  Mr.  Roberts.  "The  effect  is  stated 
to  have  been  almost  instantaneous  death."  "Some  were  placed  in 
fresh  water.  These  seemed  to  tl  .jve  well."  As  to  narrow  distribu- 
tion, we  are  told  that  the  fishes  '41  "in  and  about  the  premises  of 
Mr.  Nixon."  "It  was  not  observed  at  the  time  that  any  fish  fell 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  83 

in  any  other  part  of  the  neighborhood,  save  in  the  particular  spot 
mentioned." 

In  the  London  Times,  March  10,  1859,  Vicar  Griffith  writes  an 
account: 

"The  roofs  of  some  houses  were  covered  with  them." 

In  this  letter  it  is  said  that  the  largest  fishes  were  five  inches  long, 
and  that  these  did  not  survive  the  fall. 

Report  of  the  British  Association,  1859-158: 

"The  evidence  of  the  fall  of  fish  on  this  occasion  was  very  con- 
clusive. A  specimen  of  the  fish  was  exhibited  and  was  found  to  be 
the  Gasterosteus  leirus. 

Gasterosteus  is  the  stickleback. 

Altogether  I  think  we  have  not  a  sense  of  total  perdition,  whea 
we're  damned  with  the  explanation  that  some  one  soused  some  one 
else  with  a  pailful  of  water,  in  which  were  thousands  of  fishes  four 
or  five  inches  long,  some  of  which  covered  roofs  of  houses,  and  some 
of  which  remained  ten  minutes  in  the  air.  By  way  of  contrast  we 
offer  our  own  acceptance: 

That  the  bottom  of  a  super-geographical  pond  had  dropped  out. 

I  have  a  great  many  notes  upon  the  fall  of  fishes,  despite  the  dif- 
ficulty these  records  have  in  getting  themselves  published,  but  I 
pick  out  the  instances  that  especially  relate  to  our  super-geographical 
acceptances,  or  to  the  Principles  of  Super-Geography:  or  data  of 
things  that  have  been  in  the  air  longer  than  acceptably  could  a 
whirlwind  carry  them ;  that  have  fallen  with  a  distribution  narrower 
than  is  attributable  to  a  whirlwind;  that  have  fallen  for  a  consid- 
erable length  of  time  upon  the  same  narrow  area  of  land. 

These  three  factors  indicate,  somewhere  not  far  aloft,  a  region  of 
inertness  to  this  earth's  gravitation,  of  course,  however,  a  region  that, 
by  the  flux  and  variation  of  all  things,  must  at  times  be  susceptible 
— but,  afterward,  our  heresy  will  bifurcate 

In  amiable  accommodation  to  the  crucifixion  it'll  get,  I  think 

But  so  impressed  are  we  with  the  datum  that,  though  there  have 
been  many  reports  of  small  frogs  that  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  not 
one  report  upon  a  fall  of  tadpoles  is  findable,  that  to  these  circum- 
stances another  adjustment  must  be  made. 

Apart  from  our  three  factors  cf  indication,  an  extraordinary  ob- 
servation is  the  fall  of  living  things  without  injury  to  them.  The 
devotees  of  St.  Isaac  explain  that  they  fall  upon  thick  grass  and 
so  survive:  but  Sir  James  Emerson  Teinant,  in  his  "History  of 
Ceylon,"  tells  of  a  fall  of  fishes  upon  gravel,  by  which  they  were 


84  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

seemingly  uninjured.  Something  else  apart  from  our  three  main 
interests  is  a  phenomenon  that  looks  like  what  one  might  call  an 
alternating  series  of  falls  of  fishes,  whatever  the  significance  may  be: 

Meerut,  India,  July,  1824  (Living  Age,  52-186);  Fifeshire, 
Scotland,  summer  of  1824  (Werneriam  Nat.  Hist.  Soc.  Trans., 
5-575);  Moradabad,  India,  July,  1826  (Living  Age,  52-186); 
Ross-shire,  Scotland,  1828  (Living  Age,  52-186);  Moradabad,  In- 
dia, July  20,  1829  (Lin.  S&c.  Trans.,  16-764);  Perthshire,  Scotland, 
(Living  Age,  52-186);  Argyleshire,  Scotland,  1830,  March  9,  1830 
(Recreative  Science,  3-339);  Feridpoor,  India,  Feb.  19,  1830 
(Jour.  Asiatic  Soc.  of  Bengal,  2-650). 

A  psycho-tropism  that  arises  here— disregarding  serial  significance 
— or  mechanical,  unintelligent,  repulsive  reflex — is  that  the  fishes 
of  India  did  not  fall  from  the  sky;  that  they  were  found  upon  the 
ground  after  torrential  rains,  because  streams  had  overflowed  and 
had  then  receded. 

In  the  region  of  Inertness  that  we  think  we  can  conceive  of,  or  a 
zone  that  is  to  this  earth's  gravitation  very  much  like  the  neutral 
zone  of  a  magnet's  attraction,  we  accept  that  there  are  bodies  of 
water  and  also  clear  spaces — bottoms  of  ponds  dropping  out — very 
interesting  ponds,  having  no  earth  at  bottom — vast  drops  of  water 
afloat  in  what  is  called  space — fishes  and  deluges  of  water  fall- 
ing  

But  also  other  areas,  in  which  fishes — however  they  got  there:  a 
matter  that  we'll  consider — remain  and  dry,  or  even  putrefy,  then 
sometimes  falling  by  atmospheric  dislodgment. 

After  a  "tremendous  deluge  of  rain,  one  of  the  heaviest  falls  on 
record"  (All  the  Year  Round,  8-255)  at  Rajkote,  India,  July  25, 
1850,  "the  ground  was  found  literally  covered  with  f  rhes." 

The  word  'found"  is  agreeable  to  the  repulsio...  of  the  conven- 
tionalists and  their  concept  of  an  overflowing  str<%n~but,  accord- 
ing to  Dr.  Buist,  some  of  these  fishes  were  "found"  the  tops  of 
haystacks. 

Ferrel  (A  Popular  Treatise,  p.  414)  tells  of  a  fall  of  .»  -ing  fishes — 
some  of  them  having  been  placed  in  a  tank,  where  thej  survived — 
that  occurred  in  India,  about  20  miles  south  of  Calcutta,  Sept.  20, 
1839.  A  witness  of  this  fall  says: 

"The  most  strange  thing  which  ever  struck  me  was  that  the  fish 
did  not  fall  helter-skelter,  or  here  and  there,  but  they  fell  in  a 
straight  line,  not  more  than  a  cubit  in  breadth."  See  Living  Age, 
52-186. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  85 

Amer.  Jour.  Set.,  1-32-199: 

That,  according  to  testimony  taken  before  a  magistrate,  a  fall 
occurred,  Feb.  19,  1830,  near  Feridpoor,  India,  of  many  fishes,  of 
various  sizes — some  whole  and  fresh  and  others  "mutilated  and 
putrefying."  Our  reflex  to  those  who  would  say  that,  in  the  climate 
of  India,  it  would  not  take  long  for  fishes  to  putrefy,  is — that  high 
in  the  air,  the  climate  of  India  is  not  torrid.  Another  peculiarity 
of  this  fall  is  that  some  of  the  fishes  were  much  larger  than  others. 
Or  to  those  who  hold  out  for  segregation  in  a  whirlwind,  or  that 
objects,  say,  twice  as  heavy  as  others  would  be  separated  from  the 
lighter,  we  point  out  that  some  of  these  fishes  were  twice  as  heavy 
as  others. 

In  the  Journal  of  the  Asiatic  Society  of  Bengal,  2-650,  deposi- 
tions of  witnesses  are  given: 

"Some  of  the  fish  were  fresh,  but  others  were  rotten  and  without 
heads." 

'Among  the  number  which  I  got,  five  were  fresh  and  the  rest 
stinking  and  headless." 

They  remind  us  of  His  Grace's  observation  of  some  pages  back. 

According  to  Dr.  Buist,  some  of  these  fishes  weighed  one  and  a 
half  pounds  each  and  others  three  pounds. 

A  fall  of  fishes,  at  Futtepoor,  India,  May  16,  1833: 

"They  were  all  dead  and  dry."    (Dr.  Buist,  Living  Age,  52-186.) 

India  is  far  away:  about  1830  was  long  ago: 

Nature,  Sept.  19,  1918-46: 

A  correspondent  writes,  from  the  Dove  Marine  Laboratory,  Cut- 
tercoats,  England,  that,  at  Hindon,  a  suburb  of  Sunderland,  Aug. 
24,  1918,  hundreds  of  small  fishes,  identified  as  sand  eels,  had 
fallen 

Again  the  sm-ill  area:  about  60  by  30  yards. 

The  fall  occurred  during  a  heavy  rain  that  was  accompanied  by 
thunder — or  indications  of  disturbance  aloft — but  by  no  visible 
lightning.  The  sea  is  close  to  Hindon,  but  if  you  try  to  think  of 
these  fishes  having  described  a  trajectory  in  a  whirlwind  from  the 
ocean,  consider  this  remarkable  datum: 

That,  according  to  witnesses,  the  fall  upon  this  small  area,  oc- 
cupied ten  minutes. 

I  can  not  think  of  a  clearer  indication  of  a  direct  fall  from  a 
stationary  source. 

And: 


86  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

"The  fish  were  all  dead,  and  indeed  stiff  and  hard,  when  picked 
up,  immediately  after  the  occurrence." 

By  all  of  which  I  mean  that  we  have  only  begun  to  pile  up  our 
data  of  things  that  fall  from  a  stationary  source  overhead:  we'll 
have  to  take  up  the  subject  from  many  approaches  before  our  ac- 
ceptance, which  seems  quite  as  rigorously  arrived  at  as  ever  has 
been  a  belief,  can  emerge  from  the  accursed. 

I  don't  know  how  much  the  horse  and  the  barn  will  help  us  to 
emerge:  but,  if  ever  anything  did  go  up  from  this  earth's  surface 
and  stay  up — those  damned  things — may  have: 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  May,  1878: 

In  a  tornado,  in  Wisconsin,  May  23,  1878,  "a  barn  and  a  horse 
were  carried  completely  away,  and  neither  horse  nor  barn,  nor  any  , 
portion  of  either  have  since  been  found." 

After  that,  which  would  be  a  little  strong  were  it  not  for  a 
steady  improvement  in  our  digestions  that  I  note  as  we  go  along, 
there  is  little  of  the  bizarre  or  the  unassimilable,  in  the  turtle  that 
hovered  six  months  or  so  over  a  small  town  in  Mississippi: 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  May,  1894: 

That,  May  n,  1894,  at  Vicksburg,  Miss,  fell  a  small  piece  of  ala- 
baster; that,  at  Bovina,  eight  miles  from  Vicksburg,  fell  a  gopher 
turtle. 

They  fell  in  a  hailstorm. 

This  item  was  widely  copied  at  the  time:  for  instance,  Nature, 
one  of  the  volumes  of  1894,  page  430,  and  Jour.  Roy.  Met.  Soc., 
20-273.  As  to  discussion — not  a  word.  Or  Science  and  its  continu- 
ity with  Presbyterianism — data  like  this  are  damned  at  birth.  The 
Weather  Review  does  sprinkle,  or  baptize,  or  attempt  to  save,  this 
infant — but  in  all  the  meteorological  literature  that  I  have  gone 
through,  after  that  date — not  a  word,  except  mention  once  or  twice. 
The  Editor  of  the  Review  says: 

"An  examination  of  the  weather  map  shows  that  these  hailstorms 
occur  on  the  south  side  of  a  region  of  cold  northerly  winds,  and 
were  but  a  small  part  of  a  series  of  similar  storms ;  apparently  some 
special  local  whirls  or  gusts  carried  heavy  objects  from  this  earth's 
surface  up  to  the  cloud  regions." 

Of  all  incredibilities  that  we  have  to  choose  from,  I  give  first 
place  to  a  notion  of  a  whirlwind  pouncing  upon  a  region  and  scrupu- 
lously selecting  a  turtle  and  a  piece  of  alabaster.  This  time,  the 
other  mechanical  thing  "there  in  the  first  place"  can  not  rise  in 
response  to  its  stimulus:  it  is  resisted  in  that  these  objects  were 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  87 

coated  with  ice — month  of  May  in  a  southern  state.  If  a  whirl- 
wind at  all,  there  must  have  been  very  limited  selection:  there  is  no 
record  of  the  fall  of  other  objects.  But  there  is  no  attempt  in  the 
Review  to  specify  a  whirlwind. 

These  strangely  associated  things  were  remarkably  separated. 

They  fell  eight  miles  apart. 

Then — as  if  there  were  real  reasoning — they  must  have  been 
high  to  fall  with  such  divergence,  or  one  of  them  must  have  been 
carried  partly  horizontally  eight  miles  farther  than  the  other.  But 
either  supposition  argues  for  power  more  than  that  of  a  local  whirl 
or  gust,  or  argues  for  a  great,  specific  disturbance,  of  which  there  is 
no  record — for  the  month  of  May,  1894. 

Nevertheless — as  if  I  really  were  reasonable — I  do  feel  that  I 
have  to  accept  that  this  turtle  had  been  raised  from  this  earth's  sur- 
face, somewhere  near  Vicksburg — because  the  gopher  turtle  is  com- 
mon in  the  southern  states. 

Then  I  think  of  a  hurricane  that  occurred  in  the  state  of  Missis- 
sippi weeks  or  months  before  May  n,  1894. 

No — I  don't  look  for  it — and  inevitably  find  it. 

Or  that  things  can  go  up  so  high  in  hurricanes  that  they  stay  up 
indefinitely — but  may,  after  a  while,  be  shaken  down  by  storms. 
Over  and  over  have  we  noted  the  occurrence  of  strange  falls  in 
storms.  So  then  that  the  turtle  and  the  piece  of  alabaster  may 
have  had  far  different  origins — from  different  worlds,  perhaps — 
have  entered  a  region  of  suspension  over  this  earth — wafting  near 
each  other — long  duration — final  precipitation  by  atmospheric  dis- 
turbance— with  hail — or  that  hailstones,  too,  when  large,  are  phe- 
nomena of  suspension  of  long  duration :  that  it  is  highly  unacceptable 
that  the  very  large  ones  could  become  so  great  only  in  falling  from 
the  clouds. 

Over  and  over  has  the  note  of  disagreeableness,  or  of  putrefaction, 
been  struck — long  duration.  Other  indications  of  long  duration. 

I  think  of  a  region  somewhere  above  this  earth's  surface,  in  which 
gravitation  is  inoperative,  and  is  not  governed  by  the  square  of  the 
distance — quite  as  magnetism  is  negligible  at  a  very  short  distance 
from  a  magnet.  Theoretically  the  attraction  of  a  magnet  should  de- 
crease with  the  square  of  the  distance,  but  the  falling-off  is  found 
to  be  almost  abrupt  at  a  short  distance. 

I  think  that  things  raised  from  this  earth's  surface  to  that  region 
have  been  held  there  until  shaken  down  by  storms — 

The  Super-Sargasso  Sea. 


88  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Derelicts,  rubbish,  old  cargoes  from  inter-planetary  wrecks; 
things  cast  out  into  what  is  called  space  by  convulsions  of  other 
planets,  things  from  the  times  of  the  Alexanders,  Caesars  and  Na- 
poleons of  Mars  and  Jupiter  and  Neptune;  things  raised  by  this 
earth's  cyclones:  horses  and  barns  and  elephants  and  flies  and 
dodoes,  moas,  and  pterodactyls;  leaves  from  modern  trees,  and 
leaves  of  the  Carboniferous  era — all,  however,  tending  to  disinte- 
grate into  homogeneous-looking  muds  or  dusts,  red  or  black  or  yel- 
low— treasure-troves  for  the  palaeontologists  and  for  the  archaeolo- 
gists— accumulations  of  centuries — cyclones  of  Egypt,  Greece,  and 
Assyria — fishes  dried  and  hard,  there  a  short  time:  others  there  long 
enough  to  putrefy 

But  the  omnipresence  of  Heterogeneity — or  living  fishes,  also — 
ponds  of  fresh  water:  oceans  of  salt  water. 

As  to  the  Law  of  Gravitation,  I  prefer  to  take  one  simple  stand: 

Orthodoxy  accepts  the  correlation  and  equivalence  of  forces: 

Gravitation  is  one  of  these  forces. 

All  other  forces  have  phenomena  of  repulsion  and  of  inertness 
irrespective  of  distance,  as  well  as  of  attraction. 

But  Newtonian  Gravitation  admits  attraction  only: 

Then  Newtonian  Gravitation  can  be  only  one-third  acceptable 
even  to  the  orthodox,  or  there  is  denial  of  the  correlation  and 
equivalence  of  forces. 

Or  still  simpler: 

Here  are  the  data. 

Make  what  you  will,  yourself,  of  them. 

In  our  Intermediatist  revolt  against  homogeneous,  or  positive,  ex- 
planations, or  our  acceptance  that  the  all-sufficing  cannot  be  less 
than  universality,  besides  which,  however,  there  would  be  nothing 
to  suffice,  our  expression  upon  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  though  it  har- 
monizes with  data  of  fishes  that  fall  as  if  from  a  stationary  source — 
and,  of  course,  with  other  data,  too — is  inadequate  to  account  for 
two  peculiarities  of  the  falls  of  frogs: 

That  never  has  a  fall  of  tadpoles  been  reported; 

That  never  has  a  fall  of  full-grown  frogs  been  reported • 

Always  frogs  a  few  months  old. 

It  sounds  positive,  bat,  if  there  be  such  reports  they  are  some- 
where out  of  my  range  of  reading. 

But  tadpoles  would  be  more  likely  to  fall  from  the  sky,  than 
would  frogs,  little  or  big,  if  such  falls  be  attributed  to  whirlwinds; 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  89 

and  more  likely  to  fall  from  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  if,  though  very 
tentatively  and  provisionally,  we  accept  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea. 

Before  we  take  up  an  especial  expression  upon  the  fall  of  imma- 
ture and  larval  forms  of  life  to  this  earth,  and  the  necessity  then  of 
conceiving  of  some  factor  besides  mere  stationariness  or  suspension 
or  stagnation,  there  are  other  data  that  are  similar  to  data  of  falls 
of  fishes. 

Science  Gossip,  1886-238: 

That  small  snails,  of  a  land  species,  had  fallen  near  Redruth, 
Cornwall,  July  8,  1886,  "during  a  heavy  thunderstorm:"  roads 
and  fields  strewn  with  them,  so  that  they  were  gathered  up  by  the 
hatful:  none  seen  to  fall  by  the  writer  of  this  account:  snails  said 
to  be  "quite  different  to  any  previously  known  in  this  district." 

But,  upon  page  282,  we  have  better  orthodoxy.  Another  corre- 
spondent writes  that  he  had  heard  of  the  supposed  fall  of  snails: 
that  he  had  supposed  that  all  such  stories  had  gone  the  way  of 
witch  stories;  that,  to  his  astonishment,  he  had  read  an  account  of 
this  absurd  story  in  a  local  newspaper  of  "great  and  deserved  re- 
pute." 

"I  thought  I  should  for  once  like  to  trace  the  origin  of  one  of 
these  fabulous  tales." 

Our  own  acceptance  is  that  justice  can  not  be  in  an  intermediate 
existence,  in  which  there  can  be  approximation  only  to  justice  or  to 
injustice;  that  to  be  fair  is  to  have  no  opinion  at  all;  that  to  be 
honest  is  to  be  uninterested;  that  to  investigate  is  to  admit  preju- 
dice; that  nobody  has  ever  really  investigated  anything,  but  has 
always  sought  positively  to  prove  or  to  disprove  something  that 
was  conceived  of,  or  suspected,  in  advance. 

"As  I  suspected,"  says  this  correspondent,  "I  found  that  the  snails 
were  of  a  familiar  land-species" — that  they  had  been  upon  the 
ground  "in  the  first  place." 

He  found  that  the  snails  had  appeared  after  the  rain:  that  "as- 
tonished rustics  had  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  they  had  fallen." 

He  met  one  person  who  said  that  he  had  seen  the  snails  fall. 

"This  was  his  error,"  says  the  investigator. 

In  the  Philosophical  Magazine,  58-310,  there  is  an  account  of 
snails  said  to  have  fallen  at  Bristol,  in  a  field  of  three  acres,  in  such 
quantities  that  they  were  shovelled  up.  It  is  said  that  the  snails 
"may  be  considered  as  a  local  species."  Upon  page  457,  another  cor- 
respondent says  that  the  numbers  had  been  exaggerated,  and  that 
in  his  opinion  they  had  been  upon  the  ground  in  the  first  place. 


90  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

But  that  there  had  been  some  unusual  condition  aloft  comes  out 
in  his  observation  upon  "the  curious  azure-blue  appearance  of  the 
sun,  at  the  time." 

Nature,  47-278: 

That,  according  to  Das  Wetter,  Dec.,  1892,  upon  August  9,  1892, 
a  yellow  cloud  appeared  over  Paderborn,  Germany.  From  this  cloud, 
fell  a  torrential  rain,  in  which  were  hundreds  of  mussels.  There  is 
no  mention  of  whatever  may  have  been  upon  the  ground  in  the  first 
place,  nor  of  a  whirlwind. 

Lizards — said  to  have  fallen  on  the  sidewalks  of  Montreal,  Can- 
ada, Dec.  28,  1857.  (Notes  and  Queries,  8-6-104.) 

In  the  Scientific  American,  3-112,  a  correspondent  writes,  from 
South  Granville,  N.  Y.,  that,  during  a  heavy  shower,  July  3,  1860, 
he  heard  a  peculiar  sound  at  his  feet,  and  looking  down,  saw  a 
snake  lying  as  if  stunned  by  a  fall.  It  then  came  to  life.  Gray 
snake,  about  a  foot  long. 

These  data  have  any  meaning  or  lack  of  meaning  or  degree  of 
damnation  you  please:  but,  in  the  matter  of  the  fall  that  occurred  at 
Memphis,  Tennessee,  occur  some  strong  significances.  Our  quasi- 
reasoning  upon  this  subject  applies  to  all  segregations  so  far  con- 
sidered. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  Jan.  15,  1877: 

That,  in  Memphis,  Tenn.,  Jan.  15,  1877,  rather  strictly  localized, 
or  "in  a  space  of  two  blocks,"  and  after  a  violent  storm  in  which 
the  rain  "fell  in  torrents,"  snakes  were  found.  They  were  crawling 
on  sidewalks,  in  yards,  and  in  streets,  and  in  masses — but  "none  were 
found  on  roofs  or  any  other  elevation  above  ground"  and  "none  were 
seen  to  fall." 

*  If  you  prefer  to  believe  that  the  snakes  had  always  been  there, 
or  had  been  upon  the  ground  in  the  first  place,  and  that  it  was  only 
that  something  occurred  to  call  special  attention  to  them,  in  the 
streets  of  Memphis,  Jan.  15,  1877 — why  that's  sensible:  that's  the 
common  sense  that  has  been  against  us  from  the  first. 

It  is  not  said  whether  the  snakes  were  of  a  known  species  or  not, 
but  that  "when  first  seen,  they  were  of  a  dark  brown,  almost 
black."  Blacksnakes,  I  suppose. 

If  we  accept  that  these  snakes  did  fall,  even  though  not  seen  to 
fall  by  all  the  persons  who  were  out  sight-seeing  in  a  violent  storm, 
and  had  not  been  in  the  streets  crawling  loose  or  in  thick  tangled 
masses,  in  the  first  place; 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  91 

If  we  try  to  accept  that  these  snakes  had  been  raised  from  some 
other  part  of  this  earth's  surface  in  a  whirlwind ; 

If  we  try  to  accept  that  a  whirlwind  could  segregate  them — 

We  accept  the  segregation  of  other  objects  raised  in  that  whirl- 
wind. 

Then,  near  the  place  of  origin,  there  would  have  been  a  fall  of 
heavier  objects  that  had  been  snatched  up  with  the  snakes — stones, 
fence  rails,  limbs  of  trees.  Say  that  the  snakes  occupied  the  next 
gradation,  and  would  be  the  next  to  fall.  Still  farther  would  there 
have  been  separate  falls  of  lightest  objects:  leaves,  twigs,  tufts  of 
grass. 

In  the  Monthly  Weather  Review  there  is  no  mention  of  other 
falls  said  to  have  occurred  anywhere  in  January,  1877. 

Again  ours  is  the  objection  against  such  selectiveness  by  a  whirl- 
wind. Conceivably  a  whirlwind  could  scoop  out  a  den  of  hibernat- 
ing snakes,  with  stones  and  earth  and  an  infinitude  of  other  debris, 
snatching  up  dozens  of  snakes, — I  don't  know  how  many  to  a  den — 
hundreds  may  be — but,  according  to  the  account  of  this  occurrence 
in  the  New  York  Times,  there  were  thousands  of  them;  alive;  from 
one  foot  to  eighteen  inches  in  length.  The  Scientific  American, 
36-86,  records  the  fall,  and  says  that  there  were  thousands  of  them. 
The  usual  whirlwind-explanation  is  given — "but  in  what  locality 
snakes  exist  in  such  abundance  is  yet  a  mystery." 

This  matter  of  enormousness  of  numbers  suggests  to  me  something 
of  a  migratory  nature — but  that  snakes  in  the  United  States  do  not 
migrate  in  the  month  of  January,  if  ever. 

As  to  falls  or  flutterings  of  winged  insects  from  the  sky,  pre- 
vailing notions  of  swarming  would  seem  explanatory  enough:  never- 
theless, in  instances  of  ants,  there  are  some  peculiar  circum- 
stances. 

L'A  stronomie,  1 889-3  53 : 

Fall  of  fishes,  June  13,  1889,  in  Holland;  ants,  Aug.  i,  1889, 
Strasbourg;  little  toads,  Aug.  2,  1889,  Savoy. 

Fall  of  ants,  Cambridge,  England,  summer  of  1874 — "some  were 
wingless."  (Scientific  American,  30-193.)  Enormous  fall  of  ants, 
Nancy,  France,  July  21,  1887 — "most  of  them  were  wingless." 
(Nature,  36-349.)  Fall  of  enormous,  unknown  ants — size  of  wasps 
—Manitoba,  June,  1895.  (Sci.  Amer.,  72-385.) 

However,  our  expression  will  be: 

That  wingless,  larval  forms  of  life,  in  numbers  so  enormous  that 


92  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

migration  from  some  place  external  to  this  earth  is  suggested,  have 
fallen  from  the  sky. 

That  these  "migrations" — if  such  can  be  our  acceptance — have 
occurred  at  a  time  of  hibernation  and  burial  far  in  the  ground  of 
larvae  in  the  northern  latitudes  of  this  earth;  that  there  is  signifi- 
cance in  recurrence  of  these  falls  in  the  last  of  January — or  that  we 
have  the  square  of  an  incredibility  in  such  a  notion  as  that  of  selec- 
tion of  larvae  by  whirlwinds,  compounded  with  selection  of  the  last 
of  January. 

I  accept  that  there  are  "snow  worms"  upon  this  earth — whatever 
their  origin  may  have  been.  In  the  Proc.  A  cad.  Nat.  Sci.  of  Phila- 
delphia, 1899-125,  there  is  a  description  of  yellow  worms  and  black 
worms  that  have  been  found  together  on  glaciers  in  Alaska.  Almost 
positively  were  there  no  other  forms  of  insect-life  upon  these  glaciers, 
and  there  was  no  vegetation  to  support  insect-life,  except  microscopic 
organisms.  Nevertheless  the  description  of  this  probably  polymor- 
phic species  fits  a  description  of  larvae  said  to  have  fallen  in  Switzer- 
land, and  less  definitely  fits  another  description.  There  is  no  opposi- 
tion here,  if  our  data  of  falls  are  clear.  Frogs  of  every-day  ponds 
look  like  frogs  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky — except  the  whitish 
frogs  of  Birmingham.  However,  all  falls  of  larvae  have  not  posi- 
tively occurred  in  the  last  of  January: 

London  Times,  April  14,  1837: 

That,  in  the  parish  of  Bramford  Speke,  Devonshire,  a  large  num- 
ber of  black  worms,  about  three-quarters  of  an  inch  in  length,  had 
fallen  in  a  snow  storm. 

In  Timb's  Year  Book,  1877-26,  it  is  said  that,  in  the  winter  of 
1876,  at  Christiania,  Norway,  worms  were  found  crawling  upon  the 
ground.  The  occurrence  is  considered  a  great  mystery,  because  the 
worms  could  not  have  come  up  from  the  ground,  inasmuch  as  the 
ground  was  frozen  at  the  time,  and  because  they  were  reported  from 
other  places,  also,  in  Norway. 

Immense  number  of  black  insects  in  a  snowstorm,  in  1827,  a* 
Pakroff,  Russia.  (Scientific  American,  30-193.) 

Fall,  with  snow,  at  Orenburg,  Russia,  Dec.  14,  1830,  of  a  multi- 
tude of  small,  black  insects,  said  to  have  been  gnats,  but  also  said 
to  have  had  flea-like  motions.  (Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  1-22-375.) 

Large  number  of  worms  found  in  a  snowstorm,  upon  the  surface 
of  snow  about  four  inches  thick,  near  Sangerfield,  N.  Y.,  Nov.  18, 
1850  (Scientific  American,  6-96).  The  writer  thinks  that  the  worms 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  93 

had  been  brought  to  the  surface  of  the  ground  by  rain,  which  had 
fallen  previously. 

Scientific  American,  Feb.  21,  1891: 

"A  puzzling  phenomenon  has  been  noted  frequently  in  some  parts 
of  the  Valley  Bend  District,  Randolph  County,  Va.,  this  winter. 
The  crust  of  the  snow  has  been  covered  two  or  three  times  with 
worms  resembling  the  ordinary  cut  worms.  Where  they  come  from, 
unless  they  fall  with  the  snow  is  inexplicable."  In  the  Scientific 
American,  Mar.  7,  1891,  the  Editor  says  that  similar  worms  had 
been  seen  upon  the  snow  near  Utica,  N.  Y.,  and  in  Oheida  and  Her- 
kimer  Counties;  that  some  of  the  worms  had  been  sent  to  the 
Department  of  Agriculture  at  Washington.  Again  two  species,  or 
polymorphism.  According  to  Prof.  Riley,  it  was  not  polymorphism, 
"but  two  distinct  species" — which,  because  of  our  data,  we  doubt. 
One  kind  was  larger  than  the  other:  color-differences  not  distinctly 
stated.  One  is  called  the  larvae  of  the  common  soldier  beetle  and 
the  other  "seems  to  be  a  variety  of  the  bronze  cut  worm."  No 
attempt  to  explain  the  occurrence  in  snow. 

Fall  of  great  numbers  of  larvae  of  beetles,  near  Mortagne,  France, 
May,  1858.  The  larvae  were  inanimate  as  if  with  cold.  (Annales 
Society  Entomologique  de  France,  1858.) 

Trans.  Ent.  Soc.  of  London,  1871-183,  records  "snowing  of 
larvae,"  in  Silesia,  1806;  "appearance  of  many  larvae  on  the  snow," 
in  Saxony,  1811;  "larvae  found  alive  on  the  snow,"  1828;  larvae 
and  snow  which  "fell  together,"  in  the  Eifel,  Jan.  30,  1847;  "fett 
of  insects,"  Jan.  24,  1849,  m  Lithuania;  occurrence  of  larvae  esti- 
mated at  300,000  on  the  snow  in  Switzerland,  in  1856.  The  com- 
piler says  that  most  of  these  larvae  live  underground,  or  at  the  roots 
of  trees  j-  that  whirlwinds  uproot  trees,  and  carry  away  the  larvae- 
conceiving  of  them  as  not  held  in  masses  of  frozen  earth — all  as 
neatly  detachable  as  currants  in  something.  In  the  Revue  et 
Magasin  de  Zoologie,  1849-72,  there  is  an  account  of  the  fall  in 
Lithuania,  Jan.  24,  1849 — that  black  larvae  had  fallen  in  enormous 
numbers. 

Larvae  thought  to  have  been  of  beetles,  but  described  as  "cater- 
pillars," not  seen  to  fall,  but  found  crawling  on  the  snow,  after  a 
snowstorm,  at  Warsaw,  Jan.  20,  1850.  (All  the  Year  Round, 
8-253.) 

Flammarion  (The  Atmosphere,  p.  414)  tells  of  a  fall  of  larvae 
that  occurred  Jan.  30,  1869,  in  a  snowstorm,  in  Upper  Savoy: 
"They  could  not  have  been  hatched  in  the  neighborhood,  for,  during 


94  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

the  days  preceding,  the  temperature  had  been  very  low";  said  to 
have  been  of  a  species  common  in  the  south  of  France.  In  La 
Science  Pour  Tons,  14-183,  it  is  said  that  with  these  larvae  there 
were  developed  insects. 

L'Astronomie,  1890-313: 

That,  upon  the  last  of  January,  1890,  there  fell,  in  a  great  tem- 
pest, in  Switzerland,  incalculable  numbers  of  larvae:  soar*  black 
and  some  yellow;  numbers  so  great  that  hosts  of  birds  were  at- 
tracted. 

Altogether  we  regard  this  as  one  of  our  neatest  expressions  for 
external  origins  and  against  the  whirlwind-explanation.  If  an  ex- 
clusionist  says  that,  in  January,  larvae  were  precisely  and  pains- 
takingly picked  out  of  frozen  ground,  in  incalculable  numbers,  he 
thinks  of  a  tremendous  force — disregarding  its  refinements:  then 
if  origin  and  precipitation  be  not  far  apart,  what  becomes  of  an 
infinitude  of  other  debris,  conceiving  of  no  time  for  segregation? 

If  he  thinks  of  a  long  translation — all  the  way  from  the  south  of 
France  to  Upper  Savoy,  he  may  think  then  of  a  very  fine  sorting 
over  by  differences  of  specific  gravity — but  in  such  a  fine  selec- 
tion, larvae  would  be  separated  from  developed  insects. 

As  to  differences  in  specific  gravity — the  yellow  larvae  that  fell 
in  Switzerland  Jan.,  1890,  were  three  times  the  size  of  the  black 
larvae  that  fell  with  them.  In  accounts  of  this  occurrence,  there  is 
no  denial  of  the  fall. 

Or  that  a  whirlwind  never  brought  them  together  and  held  them 
together  and  precipitated  them  and  only  them  together 

That  they  came  from  Genesistrine. 

There's  no  escape  from  it.  We'll  be  persecuted  for  it.  Take  it  or 
leave  it 

Genesistrine. 

The  notion  is  that  there  is  somewhere  aloft  a  place  of  origin  of  life 
relatively  to  this  earth.  Whether  it's  the  planet  Genesistrine,  or  the 
moon,  or  a  vast  amorphous  region  super-jacent  to  this  earth,  or  an 
island  in  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  should  perhaps  be  left  to  the 
researches  of  other  super — or  extra — geographers.  That  the  first 
unicellular  organisms  may  have  come  here  from  Genesistrine — or 
that  men  or  anthropomorphic  beings  may  have  come  here  before 
amoebae:  that,  upon  Genesistrine,  there  may  have  been  an  evolution 
expressible  in  conventional  biologic  terms,  but  that  evolution  upon 
this  earth  has  been — like  evolution  in  modern  Japan — induced  by 
external  influences;  that  evolution,  as  a  whole,  upon  this  earth, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  95 

has  been  a  process  of  population  by  immigration  or  by  bombard- 
ment. Some  notes  I  have  upon  remains  of  men  and  animals  en- 
cysted, or  covered  with  clay  or  stone,  as  if  fired  here  as  projectiles, 
I  omit  now,  because  it  seems  best  to  regard  the  whole  phenomenon 
as  a  tropism — as  a  geotropism — probably  atavistic,  or  vestigial,  as 
it  were,  or  something  still  continuing  long  after  expiration  of  neces- 
sity; that,  once  upon  a  time,  all  kinds  of  things  came  here  from 
Genesistrine,  but  that  now  only  a  few  kinds  of  bugs  and  things,  at 
long  intervals,  feel  the  inspiration. 

Not  one  instance  have  we  of  tadpoles  that  have  fallen  to  this 
earth.  It  seems  reasonable  that  a  whirlwind  could  scoop  up  a 
pond,  frogs  and  all  and  cast  down  the  frogs  somewhere  else:  but, 
then,  more  reasonable  that  a  whirlwind  could  scoop  up  a  pond, 
tadpoles  and  all — because  tadpoles  are  more  numerous  in  their 
season  than  are  the  frogs  in  theirs:  but  the  tadpole-season  is  earlier 
in  the  spring,  or  in  a  time  that  is  more  tempestuous.  Thinking  in 
terms  of  causation — as  if  there  were  real  causes — our  notion  is 
that,  if  X  is  likely  to  cause  Y,  but  is  more  likely  to  cause  Z,  but 
does  not  cause  Z,  X  is  not  the  cause  of  Y.  Upon  this  quasi-sorites, 
we  base  our  acceptance  that  the  little  frogs  that  have  fallen  to  this 
earth  are  not  products  of  whirlwinds:  that  they  came  from  exter- 
nality, or  from  Genesistrine. 

I  think  of  Genesistrine  in  terms  of  biologic  mechanics:  not  that 
somewhere  there  are  persons  who  collect  bugs  in  or  about  the  last 
of  January  and  frogs  in  July  and  August,  and  bombard  this  earth, 
any  more  than  do  persons  go  through  northern  regions,  catching 
and  collecting  birds,  every  autumn,  then  casting  them  southward. 

But  atavistic,  or  vestigial,  geotropism  in  Genesistrine — or  a  mil- 
lion larvae  start  crawling,  and  a  million  little  frogs  start  hopping — 
knowing  no  more  what  it's  all  about  than  we  do  when  we  crawl 
to  work  in  the  morning  and  hop  away  at  night. 

I  should  say,  myself,  that  Genesistrine  is  a  region  in  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea,  and  that  parts  of  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea  have  rhythms 
of  susceptibility  to  this  earth's  attraction. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

I  ACCEPT  that,  when  there  are  storms,  the  dam-dest  of  excluded, 
excommunicated  things — things  that  are  leprous  to  the  faithful 
— are  brought  down — from  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea — or  from  what 
for  convenience  we  call  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea — which  by  no  means 
has  been  taken  into  full  acceptance  yet. 

That  things  are  brought  down  by  storms,  just  as,  from  the  depths 
of  the  sea  things  are  brought  up  by  storms.  To  be  sure  it  is 
orthodoxy  that  storms  have  little,  if  any,  effect,  below  the  waves 
of  the  ocean — but — of  course — only  to  have  an  opinion  is  to  be  ig- 
norant of,  or  to  disregard  a  contradiction,  or  something  else  that 
modifies  an  opinion  out  of  distinguishability. 

Symon's  Meteorological  Magazine,  47-180: 

That,  along  the  coast  of  New  Zealand,  in  regions  not  subject  to 
submarine  volcanic  action,  deep-sea  fishes  are  often  brought  up  by 
storms. 

Iron  and  stones  that  fall  from  the  sky;  and  atmospheric  dis- 
turbances: 

"There  is  absolutely  no  connection  between  the  two  phenomena.'* 
(Symons.) 

The  orthodox  belief  is  that  objects  moving  at  planetary  velocity 
would,  upon  entering  this  earth's  atmosphere,  be  virtually  unaffected 
by  hurricanes;  might  as  well  think  of  a  bullet  swerved  by  some  one 
fanning  himself.  The  only  trouble  with  the  orthodox  reasoning  is  the 
usual  trouble — its  phantom-dominant — its  basing  upon  a  myth — 
clata  we've  had,  and  more  we'll  have,  of  things  in  the  sky  having 
no  independent  velocity. 

There  are  so  many  storms  and  so  many  meteors  and  meteorites 
that  it  would  be  extraordinary  if  there  were  no  concurrences.  Nev- 
ertheless so  many  of  these  concurrences  are  listed  by  Prof.  Baden- 
Powell  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1850-54)  that  one — notices. 

See  Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1860 — other  instances. 

The  famous  fall  of  stones  at  Siena,  Italy,  1794 — "in  a  violent 
storm." 

See  Greg's  Catalogues — many  instances.  One  that  stands  out 

96 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  97 

is — "bright  ball  of  fire  and  light  in  a  hurricane  in  England,  Sept.  2, 
1786."  The  remarkable  datum  here  is  that  this  phenomenon  was 
visible  forty  minutes.  That's  about  800  times  the  duration  that  the 
orthodox  give  to  meteors  and  meteorites. 

See  the  Annual  Register — many  instances. 

In  Nature,  Oct.  25,  1877,  and  the  London  Times,  Oct.  15,  1877, 
something  that  fell  in  a  gale  of  Oct.  14,  1877,  is  described  as  a 
"huge  ball  of  green  fire."  This  phenomenon  is  described  by  anothef 
correspondent,  in  Nature,  17-10,  and  an  account  of  it  by  another 
correspondent  was  forwarded  to  Nature  by  W.  F.  Denning. 

There  are  so  many  instances  that  some  of  us  will  revolt  against 
the  insistence  of  the  faithful  that  it  is  only  coincidence,  and  accept 
that  there  is  connection  of  the  kind  called  causal.  If  it  is  too  dif- 
ficult to  think  of  stones  and  metallic  masses  swerved  from  their 
courses  by  storms,  if  they  move  at  high  velocity,  we  think  of  low 
velocity,  or  of  things  having  no  velocity  at  all,  hovering  a  few 
miles  above  this  earth,  dislodged  by  storms,  and  falling  luminously. 

But  the  resistance  is  so  great  here,  and  "coincidence"  so  insisted 
upon  that  we'd  better  have  some  more  instances: 

Aerolite  in  a  storm  at  St.  Leonards-on-sea,  England,  Sept.  17, 
1885 — no  trace  of  it  found  (Annual  Register,  1885) ;  meteorite  in  a 
gale,  March  i,  1886,  described  in  the  Monthly  Weather  Review, 
March,  1886;  meteorite  in  a  thunderstorm,  off  coast  of  Greece, 
Nov.  19,  1899  (Nature,  61-111);  fall  of  a  meteorite  in  a  storm, 
July  7,  1883,  near  Lachine,  Quebec  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  July, 
1883);  same  phenomenon  noted  in  Nature,  28-319;  meteorite  in  a 
whirlwind,  Sweden,  Sept.  24,  1883  (Nature,  29-15). 

London  Roy.  Soc.  Proc.,  6-276: 

A  triangular  cloud  that  appeared  hi  a  storm,  Dec.  17,  1852;  a 
red  nucleus,  about  half  the  apparent  diameter  of  the  moon,  and  a  long 
tail;  visible  13  minutes;  explosion  of  the  nucleus. 

Nevertheless,  in  Science  Gossip,  n.s.,  6-65,  it  is  said  that,  though 
meteorites  have  fallen  in  storms,  no  connection  is  supposed  to 
exist  between  the  two  phenomena,  except  by  the  ignorant  peasantry. 

But  some  of  us  peasants  have  gone  through  the  Report  of  the 
British  Association,  1852.  Upon  page  239,  Dr.  Buist,  who  had  never 
heard  of  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  says  that,  though  it  is  difficult 
to  trace  connection  between  the  phenomena,  three  aerolites  had  fallen 
in  five  months,  in  India,  during  thunderstorms,  in  1851  (may  have 
been  1852).  For  accounts  by  witnesses,  see  page  229,  of  the 
Report. 


98  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Or — we  are  on  our  way  to  account  for  "thunderstones." 

It  seems  to  me  that,  very  strikingly  here,  is  borne  out  the  gen- 
eral acceptance  that  ours  is  only  an  intermediate  existence,  in  which 
there  is  nothing  fundamental,  or  nothing  final  to  take  as  a  positive 
standard  to  judge  by. 

Peasants  believed  in  meteorites. 

Scientists  excluded  meteorites. 

Peasants  believe  in  "thunderstones." 

Scientists  exclude  "thunderstones." 

It  is  useless  to  argue  that  peasants  are  out  in  the  fields,  and  that 
scientists  are  shut  up  in  laboratories  and  lecture  rooms.  We  can  not 
take  for  a  real  base  that,  as  to  phenomena  with  which  they  are 
more  familiar,  peasants  are  more  likely  to  be  right  than  are  scien- 
tists: a  host  of  biologic  and  meteorologic  fallacies  of  peasants  rises 
against  us. 

I  should  say  that  our  "existence"  is  like  a  bridge — except  that 
that  comparison  is  in  static  terms — but  like  the  Brooklyn  Bridge, 
upon  which  multitudes  of  bugs  are  seeking  a  fundamental — coming 
to  a  girder  that  seems  firm  and  final — but  the  girder  is  built  upon 
supports.  A  support  then  seems  final.  But  it  is  built  upon  under- 
lying structures.  Nothing  final  can  be  found  in  all  the  bridge, 
because  the  bridge  itself  is  not  a  final  thing  in  i.self,  but  is  a 
relationship  between  Manhattan  and  Brooklyn.  If  our  "existence" 
is  a  relationship  between  the  Positive  Absolute  and  the  Negative 
Absolute,  the  quest  for  finality  in  it  is  hopeless:  everything  in  it 
must  be  relative,  if  the  "whole"  is  not  a  whole,  but  is,  itself,  a  rela- 
tion. 

In  the  attitude  of  Acceptance,  our  pseudo-base  is: 

Cells  of  an  embryo  are  in  the  reptilian  era  of  the  embryo; 

Some  cells  feel  stimuli  to  take  on  new  appearances. 

If  it  be  of  the  design  of  the  whole  that  the  next  era  be  mam- 
malian, those  cells  that  turn  mammalian  will  be  sustained  against 
resistance,  by  inertia,  of  all  the  rest,  and  will  be  relatively  right, 
though  not  finally  right,  because  they,  too,  in  time  will  have  to  give 
away  to  characters  of  other  eras  of  higher  development. 

If  we  are  upon  the  verge  of  a  new  era,  in  which  Exclusionism 
must  be  overthrown,  it  will  avail  thee  not  to  call  us  base-born  and 
frowsy  peasants. 

In  our  crude,  bucolic  way,  we  now  offer  an  outrage  upon  com- 
mon sense  that  we  think  will  some  day  be  an  unquestioned  common- 
place: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  99 

That  manufactured  objects  of  stone  and  iron  have  fallen  from 
the  sky: 

That  they  have  been  brought  down  from  a  state  of  suspension, 
in  a  region  of  inertness  to  this  earth's  attraction,  by  atmospheric  dis- 
turbances. 

The  "thunderstone"  is  usually  "a  beautifully  polished,  wedge- 
shaped  piece  of  greenstone,"  says  a  writer  in  the  Cornhill  Magazine, 
50-517.  It  isn't:  it's  likely  to  be  of  almost  any  kind  of  stone, 
but  we  call  attention  to  the  skill  with  which  some  of  them  have 
been  made.  Of  course  this  writer  says  it's  all  superstition.  Other- 
wise he'd  be  one  of  us  crude  and  simple  sons  of  the  soil. 

Conventional  damnation  is  that  stone  implements,  already  on  the 
ground — "on  the  ground  in  the  first  place" — are  found  near  where 
lightning  was  seen  to  strike:  that  are  supposed  by  astonished  rus- 
tics, or  by  intelligence  of  a  low  order,  to  have  fallen  in  or  with 
lightning. 

Throughout  this  book,  we  class  a  great  deal  of  science  with  bad 
fiction.  When  is  fiction  bad,  cheap,  low?  If  coincidence  is  over- 
worked. That's  one  way  of  deciding.  But  with  single  writers 
coincidence  seldom  is  overworked:  we  find  the  excess  in  the  sub- 
ject at  large.  Such  a  writer  as  the  one  of  the  Cornhill  Magazine 
tells  us  vaguely  of  beliefs  of  peasants:  there  is  no  massing  of 
instance  after  instance  after  instance.  Here  ours  will  be  the 
method  of  mass-formation. 

Conceivably  lightning  may  strike  the  ground  near  where  there 
was  a  wedge-shaped  object  in  the  first  place:  again  and  again  and 
again:  lightning  striking  ground  near  wedge-shaped  object  in  China; 
lightning  striking  ground  near  wedge-shaped  object  in  Scotland; 
lightning  striking  ground  near  wedge-shaped  object  in  Central 
Africa:  coincidence  in  France;  coincidence  in  Java;  coincidence  in 
South  America 

We  grant  a  great  deal  but  note  a  tendency  to  restlessness.  Never- 
theless this  is  the  psycho- tropism  of  science  to  all  "thunderstones" 
said  to  have  fallen  luminously. 

As  to  greenstone,  it  is  in  the  island  of  Jamaica,  where  the  notion 
is  general  that  axes  of  a  hard  greenstone  fall  from  the  sky — "during 
the  rains."  (Jour.  Inst.  Jamaica,  2-4.)  Some  other  time  we  shall 
inquire  into  this  localization  of  objects  of  a  specific  material.  '''They 
are  of  a  stone  nowhere  else  to  be  found  in  Jamaica."  (Notes  and 
Queries,  2-8-24.) 

In  my  own  tendency  to  exclude,  or  in  the  attitude  of  one  peasant 


ioo  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

or  savage  who  thinks  he  is  not  to  be  classed  with  other  peasants  or 
savages,  I  am  not  very  much  impressed  with  what  natives  think. 
It  would  be  hard  to  tell  why.  If  the  word  of  a  Lord  Kelvin  carries 
no  more  weight,  upon  scientific  subjects,  than  the  word  of  a  Sitting 
Bull,  unless  it  be  in  agreement  with  conventional  opinion — I  think 
it  must  be  because  savages  have  bad  table  manners.  However,  my 
snobbishness,  in  this  respect,  loosens  up  somewhat  before  very 
widespread  belief  by  savages  and  peasants.  And  the  notion  of 
"thunderstones"  is  as  wide  as  geography  itself. 

The  natives  of  Burmah,  China,  Japan,  according  to  Blinkenberg 
(Thunder  Weapons,  p.  ioo) —  not,  of  course,  that  Blinkenberg  ac- 
cepts one  word  of  it — think  that  carved  stone  objects  have  fallen 
from  the  sky,  because  they  think  they  have  seen  such  objects  fall 
from  the  sky.  Such  objects  are  called  "thunderbolts"  in  these  coun- 
tries. They  are  called  "thunderstones"  in  Moravia,  Holland,  Bel- 
gium, France,  Cambodia,  Sumatra,  and  Siberia.  They're  called 
"storm  stones"  in  Lausitz;  "sky  arrows"  in  Slavonia;  "thunder 
axes"  in  England  and  Scotland;  "lightning  stones"  in  Spain  and 
Portugal;  "sky  axes"  in  Greece;  "lightning  flashes"  in  Brazil;  "thun- 
der teeth"  in  Amboina. 

The  belief  is  as  widespread  as  is  belief  in  ghosts  and  witches, 
which  only  the  superstitious  deny  to-day. 

As  to  beliefs  by  North  American  Indians,  Tyler  gives  a  list  of 
references  (Primitive  Culture,  2-237).  As  to  South  American  In- 
dians— "Certain  stone  hatchets  are  said  to  have  fallen  from  the 
heavens.  (Jour.  Amer.  Folk  Lore,  17-203.) 

If  you,  too,  revolt  against  coincidence  after  coincidence  after  coin- 
cidence, but  find  our  interpretation  of  "thunderstones"  just  a  little 
too  strong  or  rich  for  digestion,  we  recommend  the  explanation  of 
one,  Tallius,  written  in  1649: 

"The  naturalists  say  they  are  generated  in  the  sky  by  fulgurous 
exhalation  conglobed  in  a  cloud  by  the  circumfused  humor." 

Of  course  the  paper  in  the  Cornhttl  Magazine  was  written  with 
no  intention  of  trying  really  to  investigate  this  subject,  but  to  deride 
the  notion  that  worked-stone  objects  have  ever  fallen  from  the  sky. 
A  writer  in  the  Amer.  Jour.  Set.,  1-21-325,  read  this  paper  and 
thinks  it  remarkable  "that  any  man  of  ordinary  reasoning  powers 
should  write  a  paper  to  prove  that  thunderbolts  do  not  exist." 

I  confess  that  we're  a  little  flattered  by  that. 

Over  and  over: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNEF      /.  ;    :  \" :' '*$i\ 

"It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  suggest  to  the  intelligent  reader  that 
thunders  tones  are  a  myth." 

We  contend  that  there  is  a  misuse  of  a  word  here:  we  admit 
that  only  we  are  intelligent  upon  this  subject,  if  by  intelligence  is 
meant  the  inquiry  of  inequilibrium,  and  that  all  other  intellection  is 
only  mechanical  reflex — of  course  that  intelligence,  too,  is  me- 
chanical, but  less  orderly  and  confined:  less  obviously  mechanical — 
that  as  an  acceptance  of  ours  becomes  firmer  and  firmer-established, 
we  pass  from  the  state  of  intelligence  to  reflexes  in  ruts.  An  odd 
thing  is  that  intelligence  is  usually  supposed  to  be  creditable.  It 
may  be  in  the  sense  that  it  is  mental  activity  trying  to  find  out,  but 
it  is  confession  of  ignorance.  The  bees,  the  theologians,  the  dog- 
matic scientists  are  the  intellectual  aristocrats.  The  rest  f  us 
are  plebeians,  not  yet  graduated  to  Nirvana,  or  to  the  instinctive 
and  suave  as  differentiated  from  the  intelligent  and  crude. 

Blinkenberg  gives  many  instances  of  the  superstition  of  "thunder- 
stones"  which  flourishes  only  where  mentality  is  in  a  lamentable 
state — or  universally.  In  Malacca,  Sumatra,  and  Java,  natives  say 
that  stone  axes  have  often  been  found  under  trees  that  have  been 
struck  by  lightning.  Blinkenberg  does  not  dispute  this,  but  says  it 
is  coincidence:  that  the  axes  were  of  course  upon  the  ground  in  the 
first  place:  that  the  natives  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  these 
carved  stones  had  fallen  in  or  with  lightning.  In  Central  Africa, 
it  is  said  that  often  have  wedge-shaped,  highly  polished  objects 
of  stone,  described  as  "axes,"  been  found  sticking  in  trees  that 
have  been  struck  by  lightning — or  by  what  seemed  to  be  lightning. 
The  natives,  rather  like  the  unscientific  persons  of  Memphis,  Tenn., 
when  they  saw  snakes  after  a  storm,  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  "axes"  had  not  always  been  sticking  in  the  trees.  Livingstone 
(Last  Journal,  pages  83,  89,  442,  448)  says  that  he  had  never  heard 
of  stone  implements  used  by  natives  of  Africa,  A  writer  in  the 
Report  of  the  Smithsonian  Institute,  1877-308,  says  that  there  are 
a  few. 

That  they  are  said,  by  the  natives,  to  have  fallen  in  thunder- 
storms. 

As  to  luminosity,  it  is  my  lamentable  acceptance  that  bodies  fall- 
ing through  this  earth's  atmosphere,  if  not  warmed  even,  often  fall 
with  a  brilliant  light,  looking  like  flashes  of  lightning.  This  matter 
seems  important:  we'll  take  it  up  later,  with  data. 

In  Prussia,  two  stone  axes  were  found  in  the  trunks  of  trees,  one 
under  the  bark.  (Blinkenberg,  Thunder  Weapons,  p.  100.) 


; "  v  \l ;         :\      BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

The  finders  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  the  axes  had  fallen 
there. 

Another  stone  ax — or  wedge-shaped  object  of  worked  stone — 
said  to  have  been  found  in  a  tree  that  had  been  struck  by  some- 
thing that  looked  like  lightning.  (Thunder  Weapons,  p.  71.) 

The  finder  jumped  to  the  conclusion. 

Story  told  by  Blinkenberg,  of  a  woman,  who  lived  near  Kulsb- 
jaergene,  Sweden,  who  found  a  flint  near  an  old  willow — "near  her 
house."  I  emphasize  "near  her  house"  because  that  means  familiar 
ground.  The  willow  had  been  split  by  something.- 

She  jumped. 

Cow  killed  by  lightning,  or  by  what  looked  like  lightning  (Isle 
of  Sa  ;k,  near  Guernsey).  The  peasant  who  owned  the  cow  dug  up 
the  ground  at  the  spot  and  found  a  small  greenstone  "ax."  Blinken- 
berg says  that  he  jumped  to  the  conclusion  that  it  was  this  object 
that  had  fallen  luminously,  killing  the  cow. 

Reliquary,  1867-208: 

A  flint  ax  found  by  a  farmer,  after  a  severe  storm — described  as 
a  "fearful  storm" — by  a  signal  staff,  which  had  been  split  by  some- 
thing. I  should  say  that  nearness  to  a  signal  staff  may  be  considered 
familiar  ground. 

Whether  he  jumped,  or  arrived  at  the  conclusion  by  a  more  leis- 
urely process,  the  farmer  thought  that  the  flint  object  had  fallen  in 
the  storm. 

In  this  instance  we  have  a  lamentable  scientist  with  us.  It's 
impossible  to  have  positive  difference  between  orthodoxy  and  heresy : 
somewhere  there  must  be  a  merging  into  each  other,  or  an  over- 
lapping. Nevertheless,  upon  such  a  subject  as  this,  it  Jaes  seem 
a  little  shocking.  In  most  works  upon ''meteorites,  the  peculiar,  sul- 
phurous odor  of  things  that  fall  from  the  sky  is  mentioned.  Sir 
John  Evans  ("Stone  Implements,"  p.  57)  says—with  extraordinary 
reasoning  powers,  if  he  could  never  have  thought  such  a  in'ng  with 
ordinary  reasoning  powers — that  this  flint  object  "proved  to  have 
been  the  bolt,  by  its  peculiar  smell  when  broken." 

If  it  did  so  prove  to  be,  that  settles  the  whole  subject.  If  we 
prove  that  only  one  object  of  worked  stone  has  fallen  from  the 
sky,  all  piling  up  of  further  reports  is  unnecessary.  However,  we 
have  already  taken  the  stand  that  nothing  settles  anything;  that 
the  disputes  of  ancient  Greece  are  no  nearer  solution  now  than  they 
were  several  thousand  years  ago — all  because,  in  a  positive  sense, 
there  is  nothing  to  prove  or  solve  or  settle.  Our  object  is  to  be  more 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  103 

nearly  real  than  our  opponents.  Wideness  is  an  aspect  of  the 
Universal.  We  go  on  widely.  According  to  us  the  fat  man  is  nearer 
godliness  than  is  the  thin  man.  Eat,  drink,  and  approximate  to  the 
Positive  Absolute.  Beware  of  negativeness,  by  which  we  mean 
indigestion. 

The  vast  majority  of  "thunderstones"  are  described  as  "axes," 
but  Meunier  (La  Nature,  1892-2-381)  tells  of  one  that  was  in  his 
possession;  said  to  have  fallen  at  Ghardia,  Algeria,  contrasting  "pro- 
foundment"  (pear-shaped)  with  the  angular  outlines  of  ordinary 
meteorites.  The  conventional  explanation  that  it  had  been  formed 
as  a  drop  of  molten  matter  from  a  larger  body  seems  reasonable  to 
me;  but  with  less  agreeableness  I  note  its  fall  in  a  thunderstorm, 
the  datum  that  turns  the  orthodox  meteorologist  pale  with  rage,  or 
induces  a  slight  elevation  of  his  eyebrows,  if  you  mention  it  to 
him. 

Meunier  tells  of  another  "  thunders  tone"  said  to  have  fallen  in 
North  Africa.  Meunier,  too,  is  a  little  lamentable  here:  he  quotes 
a  soldier  of  experience  that  such  objects  fall  most  frequently  in 
the  deserts  of  Africa. 

Rather  miscellaneous  now: 

"Thunderstone"  said  to  have  fallen  in  London,  April,  1876: 
weight  about  8  pounds:  no  particulars  as  to  shape  (Timb's  Year 
Book,  1877-246). 

"Thunderstone"  said  to  have  fallen  at  Cardiff,  Sept.  26,  1916 
(London  Times,  Sept.  28,  1916).  According  to  Nature,  98-95,  it 
was  coincidence;  only  a  lightning  flash  had  been  seen. 

Stone  that  fell  in  a  storm,  near  St.  Albans,  England:  accepted  by 
the  Museum  of  St.  Albans;  said,  at  the  British  Museum,  not  to  be 
of  "true  meteoritic  material."  (Nature,  80-34.) 

London  Times,  April  26,  1876: 

That,  April  20,  1876,  near  Wolverhampton,  fell  a  mass  of 
meteoritic  iron  durir'  -  heavy  fall  of  rain.  An  account  of  this 
phenomenon  in  Nt>  4-272,  by  H.  S.  Maskelyne,  who  accepts 

it  as  authentic.    h  >  Nature,  13-531. 

For  three  .  see  the  Scentific  American,  47-194;  52- 

83;  68-325. 

As  to   \  e  larger  than  could  very  well  be  called  an 

"ax": 

Nature, 

That.  ."  , ,  1884,  at  Tysnas,  Norway,  a  meteorite  had  fallen: 

that  the  «L.      was  torn  up  at  the  spot  where  the  object  had  been 


104  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

supposed  to  have  fallen;  that  two  days  later  "a  very  peculiar  stone" 
was  found  near  by.  The  description  is — "in  shape  and  size  very 
like  the  fourth  part  of  a  large  Stilton  cheese." 

It  is  our  acceptance  that  many  objects  and  different  substances 
have  been  brought  down,  by  atmospheric  disturbance  from  what — 
only  as  a  matter  of  convenience  now,  and  until  we  have  more 
data — we  call  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea;  however,  our  chief  interest  is 
in  objects  that  have  been  shaped  by  means  similar  to  human  handi- 
craft. 

Description  of  the  "thunderstones"  of  Burmah  (Proc.  Asiatic 
Soc.  of  Bengal,  1869-183):  said  to  be  of  a  kind  of  stone  unlike 
any  other  found  in  Burmah;  called  "thunderbolts"  by  the  natives. 
I  think  there's  a  good  deal  of  meaning  in  such  expressions  as  "unlike 
any  other  found  in  Burmah" — but  that  if  they  had  said  anything 
more  definite,  there  would  have  been  unpleasant  consequences  to 
writers  in  the  igth  century. 

More  about  the  "thunderstones"  of  Burmah,  in  the  Proc.  Soc. 
Antiq.  of  London,  2-3-97.  One  °f  them,  described  as  an  "adze," 
was  exhibited  by  Captain  Duff,  who  wrote  that  there  was  no  stone 
like  it  in  its  neighborhood. 

Of  course  it  may  not  be  very  convincing  to  say  that  because  a 
stone  is  unlike  neighboring  stones  it  had  foreign  origin — also  we 
fear  it  is  a  kind  of  plagiarism:  we  got  it  from  the  geologists,  who 
demonstrate  by  this  reasoning  the  foreign  origin  of  erratics.  We 
fear  we're  a  little  gross  and  scientific  at  times. 

But  it's  my  acceptance  that  a  great  deal  of  scientific  literature 
must  be  read  between  the  lines.  It's  not  every  one  who  has  the 
lamentableness  of  a  Sir  John  Evans.  Just  as  a  great  deal  of  Vol- 
taire's meaning  was  inter-linear,  we  suspect  that  a  Captain  Duff 
merely  hints  rather  than  to  risk  having  a  Prof.  Lawrence  Smith  fly 
at  him  and  call  him  "a  half-insane  man."  Whatever  Captain  Duff's 
meaning  may  have  been,  and  whether  he  smiled  like  a  Voltaire  when 
he  wrote  it,  Captain  Duff  writes  of  "the  extremely  soft  nature  of 
the  stone,  rendering  it  equally  useless  as  an  offensive  or  defensive 
weapon." 

Story,  by  a  correspondent,  in  Nature,  34-53,  of  a  Malay,  of  "con- 
siderable social  standing" — and  one  thing  about  our  data  is  that, 
damned  though  they  be,  they  do  so  often  bring  us  into  awful  good 
company — who  knew  of  a  tree  that  had  been  struck,  about  a  month 
before,  by  something  in  a  thunderstorm.  He  searched  among 
the  roots  of  this  tree  and  found  a  "thunderstone."  Not  said  whether 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  105 

he  jumped  or  leaped  to  the  conclusion  that  it  had  fallen:  process 
likely  to  be  more  leisurely  in  tropical  countries.  Also  I'm  afraid 
his  way  of  reasoning  was  not  very  original:  just  so  were  fragments 
of  the  Bath-furnace  meteorite,  accepted  by  orthodoxy,  discovered. 

We  shall  now  have  an  unusual  experience.  We  shall  read  of  some 
reports  of  extraordinary  circumstances  that  were  investigated  by  a 
man  of  science — not,  of  course  that  they  were  really  investigated  by 
him,  but  that  his  phenomena  occupied  a  position  approximating 
higher  to  real  investigation  than  to  utter  neglect.  Over  and  over  we 
read  of  extraordinary  occurrences — no  discussion;  not  even  a  com- 
ment afterward  findable;  mere  mention  occasionally — burial  and 
damnation. 

The  extraordinary  and  how  quickly  it  is  hidden  away. 

Burial  and  damnation,  or  the  obscurity  of  the  conspicuous. 

We  did  read  of  a  man  who,  in  the  matter  of  snails,  did  travel  some 
distance  to  assure  himself  of  something  that  he  had  suspected  in 
advance;  and  we  remember  Prof.  Hitchcock,  who  had  only  to  smite 
Amherst  with  the  wand  of  his  botanical  knowledge,  and  lo!  two 
fungi  sprang  up  before  night;  and  we  did  read  of  Dr.  Gray  and  his 
thousands  of  fishes  from  one  pailful  of  water — but  these  instances 
stand  out;  more  frequently  there  was  no  "investigation."  We 
now  have  a  good  many  reported  occurrences  that  were  "investi- 
gated." Of  things  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  we  make,  in 
the  usual  scientific  way,  two  divisions:  miscellaneous  objects  and 
substances,  and  symmetric  objects  attributable  to  beings  like  human 
beings,  sub-dividing  into — wedges,  spheres,  and  disks. 

Jour.  Roy.  Met.  Soc.,  14-207: 

That,  July  2,  1866,  a  correspondent  to  a  London  newspaper 
wrote  that  something  had  fallen  from  the  sky,  during  a  thunder- 
storm of  June  30,  1866,  at  Netting  Hill.  Mr.  G.  T.  Symons,  of 
Symons'  Meteorological  Magazine,  investigated,  about  as  fairly,  and 
with  about  as  unprejudiced  a  mind,  as  anything  ever  has  been 
investigated. 

He  says  that  the  object  was  nothing  but  a  lump  of  coal:  that, 
next  door  to  the  home  of  the  correspondent  coal  had  been  unloaded 
the  day  before.  With  the  uncanny  wisdom  of  the  stranger  upon 
unfamiliar  ground  that  we  have  noted  before,  Mr.  Symons  saw 
that  the  coal  reported  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  and  the  coal 
unloaded  more  prosaically  the  day  before,  were  identical.  Persons 
in  the  neighborhood,  unable  to  make  this  simple  identification,  had 
bought  from  the  correspondent  pieces  of  the  object  reported  to  have 


io6  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

fallen  from  the  sky.  As  to  credulity,  I  know  of  no  limits  for  it — 
but  when  it  comes  to  paying  out  money  for  credulity — oh,  no 
standards  to  judge  by,  of  course — just  the  same 

The  trouble  with  efficiency  is  that  it  will  merge  away  into  excess. 
With  what  seems  to  me  to  be  super-abundance  of  convincingness, 
Mr.  Symons  then  lugs  another  character  into  his  little  comedy: 

That  it  was  all  a  hoax  by  a  chemist's  pupil,  who  had  filled  a  cap- 
sule with  an  explosive,  and  "during  the  storm  had  thrown  the 
burning  mass  into  the  gutter,  so  making  an  artificial  thunder- 
bolt." 

Or  even  Shakespeare,  with  all  his  inartistry,  did  not  lug  in  King 
Lear  to  make  Hamlet  complete. 

Whether  I'm  lugging  in  something  that  has  no  special  meaning, 
myself,  or  not,  I  find  that  this  storm  of  June  30,  1866,  was  peculiar. 
It  is  described  in  the  London  Times,  July  2,  1866:  that  "during  the 
storm,  the  sky,  in  many  places  remained  partially  clear  while  hail 
and  rain  were  falling."  That  may  have  more  meaning  when  we 
take  up  the  possible  extra-mundane  origin  of  some  hailstones,  espe- 
cially if  they  fall  from  a  cloudless  sky.  Mere  suggestion,  not  worth 
much,  that  there  may  have  been  falls  of  extra-mundane  substances, 
in  London,  June  30,  1866. 

Clinkers,  said  to  have  fallen,  during  a  storm,  at  Kilburn,  July  5, 
1877: 

According  to  the  Kilburn  Times,  July  7,  1877,  quoted  by  Mr. 
Symons,  a  street  had  been  "literally  strewn,"  during  the  storm,  with 
a  mass  of  clinkers,  estimated  at  about  two  bushels:  sizes  from  that 
of  a  walnut  to  that  of  a  man's  hand — "pieces  of  the  clinkers  can  be 
seen  at  the  Kilburn  Times  office." 

If  these  clinkers,  or  cinders,  were  refuse  from  one  of  the  super- 
mercantile  constructions  from  which  coke  and  coal  and  ashes  occa- 
sionally fall  to  this  earth,  or,  rather,  to  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  from 
which  dislodgment  by  tempests  occurs,  it  is  intermediatistic  to 
accept  that  they  must  merge  away  somewhere  with  local  phenomena 
of  the  scene  of  precipitation.  If  a  red-hot  stove  should  drop  from 
a  cloud  into  Broadway,  some  one  would  find  that  at  about  the 
time  of  the  occurrence,  a  moving  van  had  passed,  and  that  the 
moving  men  had  tired  of  the  stove,  or  something — that  it  had  not 
been  really  red-hot,  but  had  been  rouged  instead  of  blacked,  by 
some  absent-minded  housekeeper.  Compared  with  some  of  the 
scientific  explanations  that  we  have  encountered,  there's  consider- 
able restraint,  I  think,  in  that  one. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  107 

Mr.  Symons  learned  that  in  the  same  street — he  emphasizes  that 
it  was  a  short  street — there  was  a  fire-engine  station.  I  had  such 
an  impression  of  him  hustling  and  bustling  around  at  Notting  Hill, 
searching  cellars  until  he  found  one  with  newly  arrived  coal  in  it; 
ringing  door  bells,  exciting  a  whole  neighborhood,  calling  up  to 
second-story  windows,  stopping  people  in  the  streets,  hotter  and  hot- 
ter on  the  trail  of  a  wretched  impostor  of  a  chemist's  pupil.  After 
his  efficiency  at  Notting  Hill,  we'd  expect  to  hear  that  he  went  to 
the  station,  and — something  like  this: 

"It  is  said  that  clinkers  fell,  in  your  street,  at  about  ten  minutes 
past  four  o'clock,  afternoon  of  July  fifth.  Will  you  look  over  your 
records  and  tell  me  where  your  engine  was  at  about  ten  minutes 
past  four,  July  fifth?" 

Mr.  Symons  says: 

"I  think  that  most  probably  they  had  been  raked  out  of  the  steam 
fire-engine." 

June  20,  1880,  it  was  reported  that  a  "thunderstone"  had  struck 
the  house  at  180  Oakley  Street,  Chelsea,  falling  down  the  chimney, 
into  the  kitchen  grate. 

Mr.  Symons  investigated. 

He  describes  the  "thunderstone"  as  an  "agglomeration  of  brick, 
soot,  unburned  coal,  and  cinder." 

He  says  that,  in  his  opinion,  lightning  had  flashed  down  the 
chimney,  and  had  fused  some  of  the  brick  of  it. 

He  does  think  it  remarkable  that  the  lightning  did  not  then 
scatter  the  contents  of  the  grate,  which  were  disturbed  only  as  if 
a  heavy  body  had  fallen.  If  we  admit  that  climbing  up  the 
chimney  to  find  out,  is  too  rigorous  a  requirement  for  a  man 
who  may  have  been  large,  dignified  and  subject  to  expansions,  the 
only  unreasonableness  we  find  in  what  he  says — as  judged  by  our 
more  modern  outlook,  is: 

"I  suppose  that  no  one  would  suggest  that  bricks  are  manufac- 
tured in  the  atmosphere." 

Sounds  a  little  unreasonable  to  us,  because  it  is  so  of  the  posi- 
tivistic  spirit  of  former  times,  when  it  was  not  so  obvious  that  the 
highest  incredibility  and  laughability  must  merge  away  with  the 
"proper" — as  the  Sci.  Am.  Sup.  would  say.  The  preposterous  is 
always  interpretable  in  terms  of  the  "proper,"  with  which  it  must 
be  continuous — or — clay-like  masses  such  as  have  fallen  from  the 
sky — tremendous  heat  generated  by  their  velocity — they  bake — 
bricks. 


io8  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

We  begin  to  suspect  that  Mr.  Symons  exhausted  himself  at 
Netting  Hill.  It's  a  warning  to  efficiency-fanatics. 

Then  the  instance  of  three  lumps  of  earthy  matter,  found  upon  a 
well-frequented  path,  after  a  thunderstorm,  at  Reading,  July  3,  1883. 
There  are  so  many  records  of  the  fall  of  earthy  matter  from  the 
sky  that  it  would  seem  almost  uncanny  to  find  resistance  here, 
were  we  not  so  accustomed  to  the  uncompromising  stands  of  ortho- 
doxy— which,  in  our  metaphysics,  represent  good,  as  attempts,  but 
evil  in  their  insufficiency.  If  I  thought  it  necessary,  I'd  list  one 
hundred  and  fifty  instances  of  earthy  matter  said  to  have  fallen  from 
the  sky.  It  is  his  antagonism  to  atmospheric  disturbance  associated 
with  the  fall  of  things  from  the  sky  that  blinds  and  hypnotizes  a 
Mr.  Symons  here.  This  especial  Mr.  Symons  rejects  the  Reading 
substance  because  it  was  not  "of  true  meteoritic  material."  It's 
uncanny — or  it's  not  uncanny  at  all,  but  universal — if  you  don't 
take  something  for  a  standard  of  opinion,  you  can't  have  any  opinion 
at  all:  but,  if  you  do  take  a  standard,  in  some  of  its  applications 
it  must  be  preposterous.  The  carbonaceous  meteorites,  which  are 
unquestioned — though  avoided,  as  we  have  seen — by  orthodoxy,  are 
more  glaringly  of  untrue  meteoritic  material  than  was  this  sub- 
stance of  Reading.  Mr.  Symons  says  that  these  three  lumps  were 
upon  the  ground  "in  the  first  place." 

Whether  these  data  are  worth  preserving  or  not,  I  think  that  the 
appeal  that  this  especial  Mr.  Symons  makes  is  worthy  of  a  place 
in  the  museum  we're  writing.  He  argues  against  belief  in  all 
external  origins  "for  our  credit  as  Englishmen."  He  is  a  patriot, 
but  I  think  that  these  foreigners  had  a  small  chance  "in  the  first 
place"  for  hospitality  from  him. 

Then  comes  a  "small  lump  of  iron  (two  inches  in  diameter)" 
said  to  have  fallen,  during  a  thunderstorm,  at  Brixton,  Aug.  17, 
1887.  Mr.  Symons  says:  "At  present  I  can  not  trace  it." 

He  was  at  his  best  at  Netting  Hill:  there's  been  a  marked  falling 
off  in  his  later  manner: 

In  the  London  Times,  Feb.  i,  1888,  it  is  said  that  a  roundish 
object  of  iron  had  been  found,  "after  a  violent  thunderstorm,"  in  a 
garden  at  Brixton,  Aug.  17,  1887.  It  was  analyzed  by  a  chemist, 
who  could  not  identify  it  as  true  meteoritic  material.  Whether  a 
product  of  workmanship  like  human  workmanship  or  not,  this 
object  is  described  as  an  oblate  spheroid,  about  two  inches  across 
its  major  diameter.  The  chemist's  name  and  address  are  given: 
Mr.  J.  James  Morgan:  Ebbw  Vale. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  109 

Garden — familiar  ground — I  suppose  that,  in  Mr.  Symons'  opinion 
this  symmetric  object  had  been  upon  the  ground  "in  the  first 
place,"  though  he  neglects  to  say  this.  But  we  do  note  that  he 
described  this  object  as  a  "lump,"  which  does  not  suggest  the 
spheroidal  or  symmetric.  It  is  our  notion  that  the  word  "lump" 
was,  because  of  its  meaning  of  amorphousness,  used  purposely  to 
have  the  next  datum  stand  alone,  remote,  without  similars.  If 
Mr.  Symons  had  said  that  there  had  been  a  report  of  another  round 
object  that  had  fallen  from  the  sky,  his  readers  would  be  attracted 
by  an  agreement.  He  distracts  his  readers  by  describing  in  terms  of 
the  unprecedented 

"Iron  cannon  ball." 

It  was  found  in  a  manure  heap,  in  Sussex,  after  a  thunder- 
storm. 

However,  Mr.  Symons  argues  pretty  reasonably,  it  seems  to  me, 
that,  given  a  cannon  ball  in  a  manure  heap,  in  the  first  place, 
lightning  might  be  attracted  by  it,  and,  if  seen  to  strike  there,  the 
untutored  mind,  or  mentality  below  the  average,  would  leap  or 
jump,  or  proceed  with  less  celerity,  to  the  conclusion  that  the  iron 
object  had  fallen. 

Except  that — if  every  farmer  isn't  upon  very  familiar  ground — 
or  if  every  farmer  doesn't  know  his  own  manure  heap  as  well  as 
Mr.  Symons  knew  his  writing  desk 

Then  comes  the  instance  of  a  man,  his  wife,  and  his  three  daugh- 
ters, at  Casterton,  Westmoreland,  who  were  looking  out  at  their 
lawn,  during  a  thunderstorm,  when  they  "considered,"  as  Mr. 
Symons  expresses  it,  that  they  saw  a  stone  fall  from  the  sky,  kill  a 
sheep,  and  bury  itself  in  the  ground. 

They  dug. 

They  found  a  stone  ball. 

Symons: 

Coincidence.    It  had  been  there  in  the  first  place. 

This  object  was  exhibited  at  a  meeting  of  the  Royal  Meteorolog- 
ical Society  by  Mr.  C.  Carus-Wilson.  It  is  described  in  the  Jour- 
nal's list  of  exhibits  as  a  "sandstone"  ball.  It  is  described  as  "sand- 
stone" by  Mr.  Symons. 

Now  a  round  piece  of  sandstone  may  be  almost  anywhere  in  the 
ground — in  the  first  place — but,  by  our  more  or  less  discreditable 
habit  of  prying  and  snooping,  we  find  that  this  object  was  rather 
more  complex  and  of  material  less  commonplace.  In  snooping 
through  Knowledge,  Oct.  9,  1885,  we  read  that  this  "thunder- 


1 10  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

stone"  was  in  the  possession  of  Mr.  C.  Carus-Wilson,  who  tells 
the  story  of  the  witness  and  his  family — the  sheep  killed,  the  burial 
of  something  in  the  earth,  the  digging,  and  the  finding.  Mr.  C. 
Carus-Wilson  describes  the  object  as  a  ball  of  hard,  ferruginous 
quartzite,  about  the  size  of  a  cocoanut,  weight  about  twelve  pounds, 
Whether  we're  feeling  around  for  significance  or  not,  there  is  a  sug- 
gestion not  only  of  symmetry  but  of  structure  in  this  object:  it  had 
an  external  shell,  separated  from  a  loose  nucleus.  Mr.  Carus- 
Wilson  attributes  this  cleavage  to  unequal  cooling  of  the  mass. 

My  own  notion  is  that  there  is  very  little  deliberate  misrepre- 
sentation in  the  writings  of  scientific  men:  that  they  are  quite  as 
guiltiness  in  intent  as  are  other  hypnotic  subjects.  Such  a  victim 
of  induced  belief  reads  of  a  stone  ball  said  to  have  fallen  from  the 
sky.  Mechanically  in  his  mind  arise  impressions  of  globular  lumps, 
or  nodules,  of  sandstone,  which  are  common  almost  everywhere. 
He  assimilates  the  reported  fall  with  his  impressions  of  objects  in 
the  ground,  in  the  first  place.  To  an  intermediatist,  the  phenomena 
of  intellection  are  only  phenomena  of  universal  process  localized  in 
human  minds.  The  process  called  "explanation"  is  only  a  local 
aspect  of  universal  assimilation.  It  looks  like  materialism:  but  the 
intermediatist  holds  that  interpretation  of  the  immaterial,  as  it  is 
called,  in  terms  of  the  material,  as  it  is  called,  is  no  more  rational 
than  interpretation  of  the  "material"  in  terms  of  the  "immaterial": 
that  there  is  in  quasi-existence  neither  the  material  nor  the  im- 
material, but  approximations  one  way  or  the  other.  But  so  hypnotic 
quasi-reasons :  that  globular  lumps  of  sandstone  are  common. 
Whether  he  jumps  or  leaps,  or  whether  only  the  frowsy  and  base- 
born  are  so  athletic,  his  is  the  impression,  by  assimilation,  that 
this  especial  object  is  a  ball  of  sandstone.  Or  human  mentality: 
its  inhabitants  are  conveniences.  It  may  be  that  Mr.  Symons'  paper 
was  written  before  this  object  was  exhibited  to  the  members  of  the 
Society,  and  with  the  charity  with  which,  for  the  sake  of  diversity, 
we  intersperse  our  malices,  we  are  willing  to  accept  that  he  "inves- 
tigated" something  that  he  had  never  seen.  But  whoever  listed 
this  object  was  uncareful:  it  is  listed  as  "sandstone." 

We're  making  excuses  for  them. 

Really — as  it  were — you  know — we're  not  quite  so  damned  as 
we  were. 

One  does  not  apologize  for  the  gods  and  at  the  same  time  feel 
quite  utterly  prostrate  before  them. 

If  this  were  a  real  existence,  and  all  of  us  real  persons,  with  real 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  in 

standards  to  judge  by,  I'm  afraid  we'd  have  to  be  a  little  severe 
with  some  of  these  Mr.  Symonses.  As  it  is,  of  course,  seriousness 
seems  out  of  place. 

We  note  an  amusing  little  touch  in  the  indefinite  allusion  to  "a, 
man,"  who  with  his  un-named  family,  had  "considered"  that  he  had 
seen  a  stone  fall.  The  "man"  was  the  Rev.  W.  Carus-Wilson,  who 
was  well-known  in  his  day. 

The  next  instance  was  reported  by  W.  B.  Tripp,  F.  R.  M.  S.— 
that,  during  a  thunderstorm,  a  farmer  had  seen  the  ground  in  front 
of  him  plowed  up  by  something  that  was  luminous. 

Dug. 

Bronze  ax. 

My  own  notion  is  that  an  expedition  to  the  north  pole  could  not 
be  so  urgent  as  that  representative  scientists  should  have  gone  to 
that  farmer  and  there  spend  a  summer  studying  this  one  reported 
occurrence.  As  it  is — un-named  farmer — somewhere — no  date.  The 
thing  must  stay  damned. 

Another  specimen  for  our  museum  is  a  comment  in  Nature, 
upon  these  objects:  that  they  are  "of  an  amusing  character,  thus 
clearly  showing  that  they  were  of  terrestrial,  and  not  a  celestial, 
character."  Just  why  celestiality,  or  that  of  it  which,  too,  is  only 
of  Intermediateness  should  not  be  quite  as  amusing  as  terrestriality 
is  beyond  our  reasoning  powers,  which  we  have  agreed  are  not  or- 
dinary. Of  course  there  is  nothing  amusing  about  wedges  and 
spheres  at  all — or  Archimedes  and  Euclid  are  humorists.  It  is 
that  they  were  described  derisively.  If  you'd  like  a  little  speci- 
men of  the  standardization  of  orthodox  opinion 

Amer.  Met.  Jour.,  4-589: 

"They  are  of  an  amusing  character,  thus  clearly  showing  that 
they  were  of  a  terrestrial  and  not  a  celestial  character." 

I'm  sure — not  positively,  of  course — that  we've  tried  to  be  as 
easy-going  and  lenient  with  Mr.  Symons,  as  his  obviously  scientific 
performance  would  permit.  Of  course  it  may  be  that  sub-con- 
sciously we  were  prejudiced  against  him,  instinctively  classing  him 
with  St.  Augustine,  Darwin,  St.  Jerome,  and  Lyell.  As  to  the 
"thunderstones,"  I  think  that  he  investigated  them  mostly  "for 
the  credit  of  Englishmen,"  or  in  the  spirit  of  the  Royal  Krakatoa 
Committee,  or  about  as  the  commission  from  the  French  Academy 
investigated  meteorites.  According  to  a  writer  in  Knowledge,  5-418, 
the  Krakatoa  Committee  attempted  not  in  the  least  to  prove  what 


\ 

112  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

had  caused  the  atmospheric  effects  of  1883,  but  to  prove — that 
Krakatoa  did  it. 

Altogether  I  should  think  that  the  following  quotation  should  be 
enlightening  to  any  one  who  still  thinks  that  these  occurrences  were 
investigated  not  to  support  an  opinion  formed  in  advance: 

In  opening  his  paper,  Mr.  Symons  says  that  he  undertook  his  in- 
vestigation as  to  the  existence  of  "thunderstones,"  or  "thunderbolts" 
as  he  calls  them — "feeling  certain  that  there  was  a  weak  point  some- 
where, inasmuch  as  'thunderbolts'  have  no  existence." 

We  have  another  instance  of  the  reported  fall  of  a  "cannon  ball." 
It  occurred  prior  to  Mr.  Symons'  investigations,  but  is  not  men- 
tioned by  him.  It  was  investigated,  however.  In  the  Proc.  Roy. 
Soc.  Edin.f  3-147,  is  the  report  of  a  "thunder stone,"  "supposed  to 
have  fallen  in  Hampshire,  Sept.,  1852."  It  was  an  iron  cannon  ball, 
or  it  was  a  "large  nodule  of  iron  pyrites  or  bisulphuret  of  iron." 
No  one  had  seen  it  fall.  It  had  been  noticed,  upon  a  garden  path, 
for  the  first  time,  after  a  thunderstorm.  It  was  only  a  "supposed" 
thing,  because "It  had  not  the  character  of  any  known  mete- 
orite." 

In  the  London  Times,  Sept.  16,  1852,  appears  a  letter  from  Mr. 
George  E.  Bailey,  a  chemist  of  Andover,  Hants.  He  says  that,  in 
a  very  heavy  thunderstorm,  of  the  first  week  of  September,  1852, 
this  iron  object  had  fallen  in  the  garden  of  Mr.  Robert  Bowling,  of 
Andover;  that  it  had  fallen  upon  a  path  "within  six  yards  of  the 
house."  It  had  been  picked  up  "immediately"  after  the  storm  by 
Mrs.  Dowling.  It  was  about  the  size  of  a  cricket  ball:  weight  four 
pounds.  No  one  had  seen  it  fall.  In  the  Times,  Sept.  15,  1852, 
there  is  an  account  of  this  thunderstorm,  which  was  of  unusual  vio- 
lence. 

There  are  some  other  data  relative  to  the  ball  of  quartz  of  West- 
moreland. They're  poor  things.  There's  so  little  to  them  that  they 
look  like  ghosts  of  the  damned.  However,  ghosts,  when  multiplied, 
take  on  what  is  called  substantiality — if  the  solidest  thing  conceiv- 
able, in  quasi-existence,  is  only  concentrated  phantomosity.  It  is 
not  only  that  there  have  been  other  reports  of  quartz  that  has  fallen 
from  the  sky;  there  is  another  agreement.  The  round  quartz  object 
of  Westmoreland,  if  broken  open  and  separated  from  its  loose  nucleus 
would  be  a  round,  hollow,  quartz  object.  My  pseudo-position  is  that 
two  reports  of  similar  extraordinary  occurrences,  one  from  England 
and  one  from  Canada — are  interesting. 

Proc.  Canadian  Institute,  3-7-8: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  113 

That,  at  the  meeting  of  the  Institute,  of  Dec.  i,  1888,  one  of  the 
members,  Mr.  J.  A.  Livingstone,  exhibited  a  globular  quartz  body 
which  he  asserted  had  fallen  from  the  sky.  It  had  been  split  open. 
It  was  hollow. 

But  the  other  members  of  the  Institute  decided  that  the  object 
was  spurious,  because  it  was  not  of  "true  meteoritic  material." 

No  date;  no  place  mentioned;  we  note  the  suggestion  that  it  was 
only  a  geode,  which  had  been  upon  the  ground  in  the  first  place.  It's 
crystalline  lining  was  geode-like. 

Quartz  is  upon  the  "index  prohibitory"  of  Science.  A  monk  who 
would  read  Darwin  would  sin  no  more  than  would  a  scientist  who 
would  admit  that,  except  by  the  "up  and  down"  process,  quartz  has 
ever  fallen  from  the  sky — but  Continuity:  it  is  not  excommunicated 
if  part  of  or  incorporated  in  a  baptized  meteorite — St.  Catherine's  of 
Mexico,  I  think.  It's  as  epicurean  a  distinction  as  any  ever  made  by 
theologians.  Fassig  lists  a  quartz  pebble,  found  in  a  hailstone 
(Bibliography,  part  2-355).  "Up  and  down,"  of  course.  Another 
object  of  quartzite  was  reported  to  have  fallen,  in  the  autumn  of 
1880,  at  Schroon  Lake,  N.  Y. — said  in  the  Scientific  American, 
43-272  to  be  a  fraud — it  was  not — the  usual.  About  the  first  of 
May,  1899,  the  newspapers  published  a  story  of  a  "snow-white" 
meteorite  that  had  fallen,  at  Vincennes,  Indiana.  The  Editor  of  the 
Monthly  Weather  Review  ("M.  W.  R."  April,  1899)  requested  the 
local  observer,  at  Vincennes,  to  investigate.  The  Editor  says  that 
the  thing  was  only  a  fragment  of  a  quartz  bowlder.  He  says  that 
any  one  with  at  least  a  public  school  education  should  know  better 
than  to  write  that  quartz  has  ever  fallen  from  the  sky. 

Notes  and  Queries,  2-8-92: 

That,  in  the  Leyden  Museum  of  Antiquities,  there  is  a  disk  of 
quartz:  6  centimeters  by  5  millimeters  by  about  5  centimeters; 
said  to  have  fallen  upon  a  plantation  in  the  Dutch  West  Indies,  after 
a  meteoric  explosion. 

Bricks. 

I  think  this  is  a  vice  we're  writing.  I  recommend  it  to  those  who 
have  hankered  for  a  new  sin.  At  first  some  of  our  data  were  of  so 
frightful  or  ridiculous  mien,  as  to  be  hated,  or  eyeBrowed,  was  only 
to  be  seen.  Then  some  pity  crept  in?  I  think  that  we  can  now 
embrace  bricks. 

The  baked-clay-idea  was  all  right  in  its  place,  but  it  rather  lacks 
distinction,  I  think.  With  our  minds  upon  the  concrete  boats  that 
have  been  building  terrestrially  lately,  and  thinking  of  wrecks  that 


H4  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

may  occur  to  some  of  them,  and  of  a  new  material  for  the  deep-sea 
fishes  to  disregard 

Object  that  fell  at  Richland,  South  Carolina — yellow  to  gray — 
said  to  look  like  a  piece  of  brick.  (Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  2-34-298.) 

Pieces  of  "furnace-made  brick"  said  to  have  fallen — in  a  hail- 
storm—at Padua,  Aug.,  1834.  (Edin.  New  Phil.  Jour.,  19-87.) 
The  writer  offered  an  explanation  that  started  another  convention: 
that  the  fragments  of  brick  had  been  knocked  from  buildings  by 
the  hailstones.  But  there  is  here  a  concomitant  that  will  be  dis- 
agreeable to  any  one  who  may  have  been  inclined  to  smile  at  the 
now  digestible-enough  notion  that  furnace-made  bricks  have  fallen 
from  the  sky.  It  is  that  in  some  of  the  hailstones — two  per  cent  of 
them — that  were  found  with  the  pieces  of  brick,  was  a  light  grayish 
powder. 

Monthly  Notices  oj  the  Royal  Astronomical  Society,  337-365: 

Padre  Sechi  explains  that  a  stone  said  to  have  fallen,  in  a  thunder- 
storm, at  Supino,  Italy,  Sept.,  1875,  had  been  knocked  from  a  roof. 

Nature,  33-1 53 : 

That  it  had  been  reported  that  a  good-sized  stone,  of  form  clearly 
artificial,  had  fallen  at  Naples,  Nov.,  1885.  The  stone  was  described 
by  two  professors  of  Naples,  who  had  accepted  it  as  inexplicable  but 
veritable.  They  were  visited  by  Dr.  H.  Johnstone-Lavis,  the  corre- 
spondent to  Nature,  whose  investigations  had  convinced  him  that  the 
object  was  a  "shoemaker's  lapstone." 

Now  to  us  of  the  initiated,  or  to  us  of  the  wider  outlook,  there  is 
nothing  incredible  in  the  thought  of  shoemakers  in  other  worlds — 
but  I  suspect  that  this  characterization  is  tactical. 

This  object  of  worked  stone,  or  this  shoemaker's  lapstone,  was 
made  of  Vesuvian  lava,  Dr.  Johnstone-Lavis  thinks:  most  probably 
of  lava  of  the  flow  of  1631,  from  the  La  Scala  quarries.  We  con- 
demn "most  probably"  as  bad  positivism.  As  to  the  "men  of  posi- 
tion," who  had  accepted  that  this  thing  had  fallen  from  the  sky — "I 
have  now  obliged  them  to  admit  their  mistake,"  says  Dr.  Johnstone- 
Lavis — or  it's  always  the  stranger  in  Naples  who  knows  La  Scala 
lava  better  than  the  natives  know  it. 

Explanation: 

That  the  thing  had  been  knocked  from,  or  thrown  from,  a  roof. 

As  to  attempt  to  trace  the  occurrence  to  any  special  roof — nothing 
said  upon  that  subject.  Or  that  Dr.  Johnstone-Lavis  called  a  carved 
stone  a  "lapstone,"  quite  as  Mr.  Symons  called  a  spherical  object  a 
"cannon  ball":  bent  upon  a  discrediting  incongruity: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  115 

Shoemaking  and  celestiality. 

It  is  so  easy  to  say  that  axes,  or  wedge-shaped  stones  found  on 
the  ground,  were  there  in  the  first  place,  and  that  it  is  only  coinci- 
dence that  lightning  should  strike  near  one — but  the  credibility  of 
coincidences  decreases  as  the  square  root  of  their  volume,  I  think. 
Our  massed  instances  speak  too  much  of  coincidences  of  coincidences. 
But  the  axes,  or  wedge-shaped  objects  that  have  been  found  in  trees 
are  more  difficult  for  orthodoxy.  For  instance,  Arago  accepts  that 
such  finds  have  occurred,  but  he  argues  that,  if  wedge-shaped  stones 
have  been  found  in  tree  trunks,  so  have  toads  been  found  in  tree 
trunks — did  the  toads  fall  there? 

Not  at  all  bad  for  a  hypnotic. 

Of  course,  in  our  acceptance,  the  Irish  are  the  Chosen  People.  It's 
because  they  are  characteristically  best  in  accord  with  the  under- 
lying essence  of  quasi-existence.  M.  Arago  answers  a  question  by 
asking  another  question.  That's  the  only  way  a  question  can  be  an- 
swered in  our  Hibernian  kind  of  an  existence. 

Dr.  Bodding  argued  with  the  natives  of  the  Santal  Parganas,  In- 
dia, who  said  that  cut  and  shaped  stones  had  fallen  from  the  sky, 
some  of  them  lodging  in  tree  trunks.  Dr.  Bodding,  with  orthodox 
notions  of  velocity  of  falling  bodies,  having  missed,  I  suppose,  some 
of  the  notes  I  have  upon  large  hailstones,  which,  for  size,  have  fallen 
with  astonishingly  low  velocity,  argued  that  anything  falling  from 
the  sky  would  be  "smashed  to  atoms."  He  accepts  that  objects  of 
worked  stone  have  been  found  in  tree  trunks,  but  he  explains : 

That  the  Santals  often  steal  trees,  but  do  not  chop  them  down  in 
the  usual  way,  because  that  would  be  to  make  too  much  noise:  they 
insert  stone  wedges,  and  hammer  them  instead:  then,  if  they  should 
be  caught,  wedges  would  not  be  the  evidence  against  them  that  axes 
would  be. 

Or  that  a  scientific  man  can't  be  desperate  and  reasonable  too. 

Or  that  a  pickpocket,  for  instance,  is  safe,  though  caught  with  his 
hand  in  one's  pocket,  if  he's  gloved,  say:  because  no  court  in  the 
land  would  regard  a  gloved  hand  in  the  same  way  in  which  a  bare 
hand  would  be  regarded. 

That  there's  nothing  but  intermediateness  to  the  rational  and  the 
preposterous:  that  this  status  of  our  own  ratiocinations  is  percepti- 
ble wherein  they  are  upon  the  unfamiliar. 

Dr.  Bodding  collected  50  of  these  shaped  stones,  said  to  have 
fallen  from  the  sky,  in  the  course  of  many  years.  He  says  that  the 
Santals  are  a  highly  developed  race,  and  for  ages  have  not  used 


n6  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

stone  implements — except  in  this  one  nefarious  convenience  to  him. 

All  explanations  are  localizations.  They  fade  away  before  the 
universal.  It  is  difficult  to  express  that  black  rains  in  England  do 
not  originate  in  the  smoke  of  factories — less  difficult  to  express  that 
black  rains  of  South  Africa  do  not.  We  utter  little  stress  upon  the 
absurdity  of  Dr.  Bodding's  explanation,  because,  if  anything's  ab- 
surd everything's  absurd,  or,  rather,  has  in  it  some  degree  or  aspect 
of  absurdity,  and  we've  never  had  experience  with  any  state  except 
something  somewhere  between  ultimate  absurdity  and  final  reason- 
ableness. Our  acceptance  is  that  Dr.  Bodding's  elaborate  explana- 
tion does  not  apply  to  cut-stone  objects  found  in  tree  trunks  in  other 
lands:  we  accept  that  for  the  general,  a  local  explanation  is  inade- 
quate. 

As  to  "thunderstones"  not  said  to  have  fallen  luminously,  and  not 
said  to  have  been  found  sticking  in  trees,  we  are  told  by  faithful 
hypnotics  that  astonished  rustics  come  upon  prehistoric  axes  that 
have  been  washed  into  sight  by  rains,  and  jump  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  things  had  fallen  from  the  sky.  But  simple  rustics  come 
upon  many  prehistoric  things:  scrapers,  pottery,  knives,  hammers. 
We  have  no  record  of  rusticity  coming  upon  old  pottery  after  a  rain, 
reporting  the  fall  of  a  bowl  from  the  sky. 

Just  now,  my  own  acceptance  is  that  wedge-shaped  stone  objects, 
formed  by  means  similar  to  human  workmanship,  have  often  fallen 
from  the  sky.  Maybe  there  are  messages  upon  them.  My  accept- 
ance is  that  they  have  been  called  "axes"  to  discredit  them:  or 
the  more  familiar  a  term,  the  higher  the  incongruity  with  vague 
concepts  of  the  vast,  remote,  tremendous,  unknown. 

In  Notes  and  Queries,  2-8-92,  a  writer  says  that  he  had  a 
"thunderstone,"  which  he  had  brought  from  Jamaica.  The  descrip- 
tion is  of  a  wedge-shaped  object;  not  of  an  ax: 

"It  shows  no  mark  of  having  been  attached  to  a  handle." 

Of  ten  "thunderstones,"  figured  upon  different  pages  in  Blinken- 
berg's  book,  nine  show  no  sign  of  ever  having  been  attached  to  a 
handle:  one  is  perforated. 

But  in  a  report  by  Dr.  C.  Leemans,  Director  of  the  Leyden  Mu- 
seum of  Antiquities,  objects,  said  by  the  Japanese  to  have  fallen 
from  the  sky,  are  alluded  to  throughout  as  "wedges."  In  the 
Archaeologic  Journal,  11-118,  in  a  paper  upon  the  "thunderstones" 
of  Java,  the  objects  are  called  "wedges"  and  not  "axes." 

Our  notion  is  that  rustics  and  savages  call  wedge-shaped  objects 
that  fall  from  the  sky,  "axes":  that  scientific  men,  when  it  suits 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  117 

their  purposes,  can  resist  temptations  to  prolixity  and  pedantry,  and 
adopt  the  simple:  that  they  can  be  intelligible  when  derisive. 

All  of  which  lands  us  in  a  confusion,  worse,  I  think  than  we  were 
in  before  we  so  satisfactorily  emerged  from  the  distresses  of — but- 
ter and  blood  and  ink  and  paper  and  punk  and  silk.  Now  it's  can- 
non balls  and  axes  and  disks — if  a  "lapstone"  be  a  disk — it's  a  flat 
stone,  at  any  rate. 

A  great  many  scientists  are  good  impressionists:  they  snub  the 
impertinences  of  details.  Had  he  been  of  a  coarse,  grubbing  nature, 
I  think  Dr.  Bodding  could  never  have  so  simply  and  beautifully  ex- 
plained the  occurrence  of  stone  wedges  in  tree  trunks.  But  to  a 
realist,  the  story  would  be  something  like  this: 

A  man  who  needed  a  tree,  in  a  land  of  jungles,  where,  for  some 
unknown  reason,  every  one's  very  selfish  with  his  trees,  conceives 
that  hammering  stone  wedges  makes  less  noise  than  does  the  chop- 
ping of  wood:  he  and  his  descendants,  in  a  course  of  many  years, 
cut  down  trees  with  wedges,  and  escape  penalty,  because  it  never 
occurs  to  a  prosecutor  that  the  head  of  an  ax  is  a  wedge. 

The  story  is  like  every  other  attempted  positivism — beautiful  and 
complete,  until  we  see  what  it  excludes  or  disregards;  whereupon  it 
becomes  the  ugly  and  incomplete — but  not  absolutely,  because  there 
is  probably  something  of  what  is  called  foundation  for  it.  Per- 
haps a  mentally  incomplete  Santal  did  once  do  something  of  the  kind. 
Story  told  to  Dr.  Bodding:  in  the  usual  scientific  way,  he  makes  a 
dogma  of  an  aberration. 

Or  we  did  have  to  utter  a  little  stress  upon  this  matter,  after 
all.  They're  so  hairy  and  attractive,  these  scientists  of  the  igth 
century.  We  feel  the  zeal  of  a  Sitting  Bull  when  we  think  of  their 
scalps.  We  shall  have  to  have  an  expression  of  our  own  upon  this 
confusing  subject.  We  have  expressions:  we  don't  call  them  ex- 
planations: we've  discarded  explanations  with  beliefs.  Though 
every  one  who  scalps  is,  in  the  oneness  of  allness,  himself  likely  to 
be  scalped,  there  is  such  a  discourtesy  to  an  enemy  as  the  wearing 
of  wigs. 

Cannon  balls  and  wedges,  and  what  may  they  mean? 

Bombardments  of  this  earth 

Attempts  to  communicate 

Or  visitors  to  this  earth,  long  ago — explorers  from  the  moon — 
taking  back  with  them,  as  curiosities,  perhaps,  implements  of  this 
earth's  prehistoric  inhabitants — a  wreck — a  cargo  of  such  things 


n8  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

held  for  ages  in  suspension  in  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea — falling,  or 
shaken,  down  occasionally  by  storms 

But,  by  preponderance  of  description,  we  can  not  accept  that 
"thunders tones"  ever  were  attached  to  handles,  or  are  prehistoric 
axes 

As  to  attempts  to  communicate  with  this  earth,  by  means  of 
wedge-shaped  objects  especially  adapted  to  the  penetration  of  vast, 
gelatinous  areas  spread  around  this  earth 

In  the  Proc.  Roy.  Irish  Acad.,  9-337,  there  is  an  account  of  a 
stone  wedge  that  fell  from  the  sky,  near  Cashel,  Tipperary,  Aug.  2, 
1865.  The  phenomenon  is  not  questioned,  but  the  orthodox  prefer- 
ence is  to  call  it,  not  ax-like,  nor  wedge-shaped,  but  "pyramidal." 
For  data  of  other  pyramidal  stones  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky, 
see  Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1861-34.  One  fell  at  Segowolee,  India, 
March  6,  1853.  Of  the  object  that  fell  at  Cashel,  Dr.  Haughton 
says  in  the  Proceedings:  "A  singular  feature  is  observable  in  this 
stone,  that  I  have  never  seen  in  any  other: — the  rounded  edges  of 
the  pyramid  are  sharply  marked  by  lines  on  the  black  crust,  as  per- 
fect as  if  made  by  a  ruler."  Dr.  Haughton's  idea  is  that  the  marks 
may  have  been  made  by  "some  peculiar  tension  in  the  cooling."  It 
must  have  been  very  peculiar,  if  in  all  aerolites  not  wedge-shaped, 
no  such  phenomenon  had  ever  been  observed.  It  merges  away  with 
one  or  two  instances,  known,  after  Dr.  Haughton's  time,  of  seeming 
stratification  in  meteorites.  Stratification  in  meteorites,  however, 
is  denied  by  the  faithful. 

I  begin  to  suspect  something  else. 

A  whopper  is  coming. 

Later  it  will  be  as  reasonable,  by  familiarity,  as  anything  else 
ever  said. 

If  some  one  should  study  the  stone  of  Cashel,  as  Champollion 
studied  the  Rosetta  stone,  he  might — or,  rather,  would  inevitably — 
find  meaning  in  those  lines,  and  translate  them  into  English 

Nevertheless  I  begin  to  suspect  something  else:  something  more 
subtle  and  esoteric  than  graven  characters  upon  stones  that  have 
fallen  from  the  sky,  in  attempts  to  communicate.  The  notion  that 
other  worlds  are  attempting  to  communicate  with  this  world  is 
widespread:  my  own  notion  is  that  it  is  not  attempt  at  all — that  it 
was  achievement  centuries  ago. 

I  should  like  to  send  out  a  report  that  a  "thunderstone"  had 
fallen,  say,  somewhere  in  New  Hampshire 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  119 

And  keep  track  of  every  person  who  came  to  examine  that  stone — 
trace  down  his  affiliations — keep  track  of  him — 

Then  send  out  a  report  that  a  "thunderstone"  had  fallen  at 
Stockholm,  say 

Would  one  of  the  persons  who  had  gone  to  New  Hampshire,  be 
met  again  in  Stockholm?  But — what  if  he  had  no  anthropological, 
lapidarian,  or  meteorological  affiliations — but  did  belong  to  a  secret 
society 

It  is  only  a  dawning  credulity. 

Of  the  three  forms  of  symmetric  objects  that  have,  or  haven't, 
fallen  from  the  sky,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  disk  is  the  most  strik- 
ing. So  far,  in  this  respect,  we  have  been  at  our  worst — possibly 
that's  pretty  bad — but  "lapstones"  are  likely  to  be  of  considerable 
variety  of  form,  and  something  that  is  said  to  have  fallen  at  some- 
time somewhere  in  the  Dutch  West  Indies  is  profoundly  of  the  un- 
chosen. 

Now  we  shall  have  something  that  is  high  up  in  the  castes  of 
the  accursed: 

Comptes  Rendus,  1887-182: 

That,  upon  June  20,  1887,  in  a  "violent  storm" — two  months  be- 
fore the  reported  fall  of  the  symmetric  iron  object  of  Brixton 
— a  small  stone  had  fallen  from  the  sky  at  Tarbes,  France:  13 
millimeters  in  diameter;  5  millimeters  thick;  weight  2  grammes. 
Reported  to  the  French  Academy  by  M.  Sudre,  professor  of  the 
Normal  School,  Tarbes. 

This  time  the  old  convenience  "there  in  the  first  place"  is  too 
greatly  resisted — the  stone  was  covered  with  ice. 

This  object  had  been  cut  and  shaped  by  means  similar  to  hu- 
man hands  and  human  mentality.  It  was  a  disk  of  worked  stone 
— "tres  regulier."  "II  a  ete  assurement  travaille." 

There's  not  a  word  as  to  any  known  whirlwind  anywhere:  noth- 
ing of  other  objects  or  debris  that  fell  at  or  near  this  date,  in  France. 
The  thing  had  fallen  alone.  But  as  mechanically  as  any  part  of  a 
machine  responds  to  its  stimulus,  the  explanation  appears  in  Comp- 
tes Rendus,  that  this  stone  had  been  raised  by  a  whirlwind  and  then 
flung  down. 

It  may  be  that  in  the  whole  nineteenth  century  no  event  more 
important  than  this  occurred.  In  La  Nature,  1887,  and  in  L'Annee 
Scientifique,  1887,  this  occurrence  is  noted.  It  is  mentioned  in  one 
of  the  summer  numbers  of  Nature,  1887.  Fassig  lists  a  paper  upon 
it  in  the  Annuaire  de  Soc.  Met.,  1887. 


120  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Not  a  word  of  discussion. 

Not  a  subsequent  mention  can  I  find. 

Our  own  expression: 

What  matters  it  how  we,  the  French  Academy,  or  the  Salvation 
Army  may  explain? 

A  disk  of  worked  stone  fell  from  the  sky,  at  Tarbes,  France, 
June  20,  1887. 


CHAPTER  IX 

MY  own  pseudo-conclusion: 
That  we've  been  damned  by  giants  sound  asleep,  or  by  great 
scientific  principles  and  abstractions  that  cannot  realize  themselves: 
that  little  harlots  have  visited  their  caprices  upon  us;  that  clowns, 
with  buckets  of  water  from  which  they  pretend  to  cast  thousands 
of  good-sized  fishes  have  anathematized  us  for  laughing  disrespect- 
fully, because,  as  with  all  clowns,  underlying  buffoonery  is  the  de- 
sire to  be  taken  seriously;  that  pale  ignorances,  presiding  over 
microscopes  by  which  they  cannot  distinguish  flesh  from  nostoc 
or  fishes'  spawn  or  frogs'  spawn,  have  visited  upon  us  their  wan 
solemnities.  We've  been  damned  by  corpses  and  skeletons  and  mum- 
mies, which  twitch  and  totter  with  pseudo-life  derived  from  con- 
veniences. 

Or  there  is  only  hypnosis.  The  accursed  are  those  who  admit 
they're  the  accursed. 

If  we  be  more  nearly  real  we  are  reasons  arraigned  before  a  jury 
of  dream-phantasms. 

Of  all  meteorites  in  museums,  very  few  were  seen  to  fall.  It  is 
considered  sufficient  grounds  for  admission  if  specimens  can't  be 
accounted  for  in  any  way  other  than  that  they  fell  from  the  sky 
— as  if  in  the  haze  of  uncertainty  that  surrounds  all  things,  or  that 
is  the  essence  of  everything,  or  in  the  merging  away  of  everything 
into  something  else,  there  could  be  anything  that  could  be  accounted 
for  in  only  one  way.  The  scientist  and  the  theologian  reason  that 
if  something  can  be  accounted  for  in  only  one  way,  it  is  accounted 
for  in  that  way — or  logic  would  be  logical,  if  the  conditions  that  it 
imposes,  but,  of  course,  does  not  insist  upon,  could  anywhere  be 
found  in  quasi-existence.  In  our  acceptance,  logic,  science,  art,  re- 
ligion are,  in  our  "existence,"  premonitions  of  a  coming  awakening, 
like  dawning  awarenesses  of  surroundings  in  the  mind  of  a  dreamer. 

Any  old  chunk  of  metal  that  measures  up  to  the  standard  of 
"true  meteoritic  material"  is  admitted  by  the  museums.  It  may 
seem  incredible  that  modern  curators  still  have  this  delusion,  but  we 
suspect  that  the  date  on  one's  morning  newspaper  hasn't  much  to 


122  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

do  with  one's  modernity  all  day  long.  In  reading  Fletcher's  cata- 
logue, for  instance,  we  learn  that  some  of  the  best-known  meteorites 
were  "found  in  draining  a  field" — "found  in  making  a  road" — 
"turned  up  by  the  plow"  occurs  a  dozen  times.  Some  one  fishing 
in  Lake  Okeechobee,  brought  up  an  object  in  his  fishing  net.  No 
meteorite  had  ever  been  seen  to  fall  near  it.  The  U.  S.  National 
Museum  accepts  it.  * 

If  we  have  accepted  only  one  of  the  data  of  "untrue  meteoritic 
material" — one  instance  of  "carbonaceous"  matter — if  it  be  too  diffi- 
cult to  utter  the  word  "coal" — we  see  that  in  this  inclusion-exclusion, 
as  in  every  other  means  of  forming  an  opinion,  false  inclusion  and 
false  exclusion  have  been  practiced  by  curators  of  museums. 

There  is  something  of  ultra-pathos — of  cosmic  sadness — in  this 
universal  search  for  a  standard,  and  in  belief  that  one  has  been 
revealed  by  either  inspiration  or  analysis,  then  the  dogged  clinging 
to  a  poor  sham  of  a  thing  long  after  its  insufficiency  has  been  shown 
— or  renewed  hope  and  search  for  the  special  that  can  be  true,  or 
for  something  local  that  could  also  be  universal.  It's  as  if  "true 
meteoritic  material"  were  a  "rock  of  ages"  to  some  scientific  men. 
They  cling.  But  clingers  cannot  hold  out  welcoming  arms. 

The  only  seemingly  conclusive  utterance,  or  seemingly  substantial 
thing  to  cling  to,  is  a  product  of  dishonesty,  ignorance,  or  fatigue. 
All  sciences  go  back  and  back,  until  they're  worn  out  with  the 
process,  or  until  mechanical  reaction  occurs:  then  they  move  for- 
ward— as  it  were.  Then  they  become  dogmatic,  and  take  for  bases, 
positions  that  were  only  points  of  exhaustion.  So  chemistry  divided 
and  sub-divided  down  to  atoms;  then,  in  the  essential  insecurity  of 
all  quasi-constructions,  it  built  up  a  system,  which,  to  any  one  so 
obsessed  by  his  own  hypnoses  that  he  is  exempt  to  the  chemist's 
hypnoses,  is  perceptibly  enough  an  intellectual  anaemia  built  upon 
infinitesimal  debilities. 

In  Science,  n.s.,  31-298,  E.  D.  Hovey,  of  the  American  Mu- 
seum of  Natural  History,  asserts  or  confesses,  that  often  have  ob- 
jects of  material  such  as  fossiliferous  limestone  and  slag  been  sent 
to  him.  He  says  that  these  things  have  been  accompanied  by  as- 
surances that  they  have  been  seen  to  fall  on  lawns,  on  roads,  in  front 
of  houses. 

They  are  all  excluded.  They  are  not  of  true  meteoritic  material. 
They  were  on  the  ground  in  the  first  place.  It  is  only  by  coinci- 
dence that  lightning  has  struck,  or  that  a  real  meteorite,  which  was 
unfindable,  has  struck  near  objects  of  slag  and  limestone. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  123 

Mr.  Hovey  says  that  the  list  might  be  extended  indefinitely. 
That's  a  tantalizing  suggestion  of  some  very  interesting  stuff 

He  says: 

"But  it  is  not  worth  while." 

I'd  like  to  know  what  strange,  damned,  excommunicated  things 
have  been  sent  to  museums  by  persons  who  have  felt  convinced  that 
they  had  seen  what  they  may  have  seen,  strongly  enough  to  risk 
ridicule,  to  make  up  bundles,  go  to  express  offices,  and  write  let- 
ters. I  accept  that  over  the  door  of  every  museum,  into  which  such 
things  enter,  is  written: 

"Abandon  Hope." 

If  a  Mr.  Symons  mentions  one  instance  of  coal,  or  of  slag  or 
cinders,  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  we  are  not — except  by  as- 
sociation with  the  "carbonaceous"  meteorites — strong  in  our  im- 
pression that  coal  sometimes  falls  to  this  earth  from  coal-burning 
super-constructions,  up  somewhere 

In  Comptes  Rendus,  91-197,  M.  Daubree  tells  the  same  story. 
Our  acceptance,  then,  is  that  other  curators  could  tell  this  same 
story.  Then  the  phantomosity  of  our  impression  substantiates  pro- 
portionately to  its  multiplicity.  ,_M.  Daubree  says  that  often  have 
strange  damned  things  been  sent  to  the  French  museums,  accom- 
panied by  assurances  that  they  had  been  seen  to  fall  from  the  sky. 
Especially  to  our  interest,  he  mentions  coal  and  slag. 

Excluded. 

Buried  un-named  and  undated  in  Science's  potter's  field. 

I  do  not  say  that  the  data  of  the  damned  should  have  the  same 
rights  as  the  data  of  the  saved.  That  would  be  justice.  That 
would  be  of  the  Positive  Absolute,  and,  though  the  ideal  of,  a  viola- 
tion of,  the  very  essence  of  quasi-existence,  wherein  only  to  have 
the  appearance  of  being  is  to  express  a  preponderance  of  force  one 
way  or  another — or  inequilibrium,  or  inconsistency,  or  injustice. 

Our  acceptance  is  that  the  passing  away  of  exclusionism  is  a 
phenomenon  of  the  twentieth  century:  that  gods  of  the  twentieth 
century  will  sustain  our  notions  be  they  ever  so  unwashed  and 
frowsy.  But,  in  our  own  expressions,  we  are  limited,  by  the 
oneness  of  quasiness,  to  the  very  same  methods  by  which  orthodoxy 
established  and  maintains  its  now  sleek,  suave  preposterousnesses. 
At  any  rate,  though  we  are  inspired  by  an  especial  subtle  essence — 
or  imponderable,  I  think — that  pervades  the  twentieth  century,  we 
have  not  the  superstition  that  we  are  offering  anything  as  a  posi- 
tive fact.  Rather  often  we  have  not  the  delusion  that  we're  any  less 


124  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

superstitious  and  credulous  than  any  logician,  savage,  curator,  or 
rustic. 

An  orthodox  demonstration,  in  terms  of  which  we  shall  have  some 
heresies  is  that  if  things  found  in  coal  could  have  got  there  only 
by  falling  there — they  fell  there. 

So,  in  the  Manchester  Lit.  and  Phil.  Soc.  Mems.,  2-9-306,  it 
is  argued  that  certain  roundish  stones  that  have  been  found  in  coal 
are  "fossil  aerolites":  that  they  had  fallen  from  the  sky,  ages  ago, 
when  the  coal  was  soft,  because  the  coal  had  closed  around  them, 
showing  no  sign  of  entrance. 

Proc.  Soc.  of  Antiq.  of  Scotland,  1-1-121: 

That,  in  a  lump  of  coal,  from  a  mine  in  Scotland,  an  iron  instru- 
ment had  been  found 

"The  interest  attaching  to  this  singular  relic  arises  from  the 
fact  of  its  having  been  found  in  the  heart  of  a  piece  of  coal,  seven 
feet  under  the  surface." 

If  we  accept  that  this  object  of  iron  was  of  workmanship  be- 
yond the  means  and  skill  of  the  primitive  men  who  may  have  lived 
in  Scotland  when  coal  was  forming  there 

"The  instrument  was  considered  to  be  modern." 

That  our  expression  has  more  of  realness,  or  higher  approxima- 
tion to  realness,  than  has  the  attempt  to  explain  that  is  made  in 
the  Proceedings: 

That  in  modern  times  some  one  may  have  bored  for  coal,  and 
that  his  drill  may  have  broken  off  in  the  coal  it  had  penetrated. 

Why  he  should  have  abandoned  such  easily  accessible  coal,  I  don't 
know.  The  important  point  is  that  there  was  no  sign  of  boring: 
that  this  instrument  was  in  a  lump  of  coal  that  had  closed  around 
it  so  that  its  presence  was  not  suspected,  until  the  lump  of  coal 
was  broken. 

No  mention  can  I  find  of  this  damned  thing  in  any  other  publica- 
tion. Of  course  there  is  an  alternative  here:  the  thing  may  not 
have  fallen  from  the  sky:  if  in  coal-forming  times,  in  Scotland,  there 
were,  indigenous  to  this  earth,  no  men  capable  of  making  such  an 
iron  instrument,  it  may  have  been  left  behind  by  visitors  from  other 
worlds. 

In  an  extraordinary  approximation  to  fairness  and  justice,  which 
is  permitted  to  us,  because  we  are  quite  as  desirous  to  make  ac- 
ceptable that  nothing  can  be  proved  as  we  are  to  sustain  our  own  ex- 
pressions, we  note: 

That  in  Notes  and  Queries,  11-1-408,  there  is  an  account  of 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  125 

an  ancient  copper  seal,  about  the  size  of  a  penny,  found  in  chalk, 
at  a  depth  of  from  five  to  six  feet,  near  Bredenstone,  England.  The 
design  upon  it  is  said  to  be  of  a  monk  kneeling  before  a  virgin  and 
child:  a  legend  upon  the  margin  is  said  to  be:  "St.  Jordanis  Monachi 
Spaldingie." 

I  don't  know  about  that.  It  looks  very  desirable — undesirable  to 
us. 

There's  a  wretch  of  an  ultra-frowsy  thing  in  the  Scientific  Ameri- 
can, 7-298,  which  we  condemn  ourselves,  if  somewhere,  because 
of  the  oneness  of  allness,  the  damned  must  also  be  the  damning.  It's 
a  newspaper  story:  that  about  the  first  of  June,  1851,  a  powerful 
blast,  near  Dorchester,  Mass.,  cast  out  from  a  bed  of  solid  rock 
a  bell-shaped  vessel  of  an  unknown  metal:  floral  designs  inlaid  with 
silver;  "art  of  some  cunning  workman."  The  opinion  of  the  Editor 
of  the  Scientific  American  is  that  the  thing  had  been  made  by 
Tubal  Cain,  who  was  the  first  inhabitant  of  Dorchester.  Though 
I  fear  that  this  is  a  little  arbitrary,  I  am  not  disposed  to  fly  rabidly 
at  every  scientific  opinion. 

Nature,  35-36: 

A  block  of  metal  found  in  coal,  in  Austria,  1885.  It  is  now  in  the 
Salsburg  museum. 

This  time  we  have  another  expression.  Usually  our  intermediatist 
attack  upon  provincial  positivism  is:  Science,  in  its  attempted  posi- 
tivism takes  something  such  as  "true  meteoritic  material"  as  a 
standard  of  judgment;  but  carbonaceous  matter,  except  for  its  rela- 
tive infrequency,  is  just  as  veritable  a  standard  of  judgment;  car- 
bonaceous matter  merges  away  into  such  a  variety  of  organic  sub- 
stances, that  all  standards  are  reduced  to  indistinguishability:  if, 
then,  there  is  no  real  standard  against  us,  there  is  no  real  resistance 
to  our  own  acceptances.  Now  our  intermediatism  is:  Science  takes 
"true  meteoritic  material"  as  a  standard  of  admission;  but  now 
we  have  an  instance  that  quite  as  truly  makes  "true  meteoritic  ma- 
terial" a  standard  of  exclusion;  or,  then,  a  thing  that  denies  itself 
is  no  real  resistance  to  our  own  acceptances — this  depending  upon 
whether  we  have  a  datum  of  something  of  "true  meteoritic  material" 
that  orthodoxy  can  never  accept  fell  from  the  sky. 

We're  a  little  involved  here.  Our  own  acceptance  is  upon  a 
carved,  geometric  thing  that,  if  found  in  a  very  old  deposit,  antedates 
human  life,  except,  perhaps,  very  primitive  human  life,  as  an  in- 
digenous product  of  this  earth:  but  we're  quite  as  much  interested  in 
the  dilemma  it  made  for  the  faithful. 


126  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

It  is  of  "true  meteoritic  material."  In  V Astronomic,  1887-114, 
it  is  said  that,  though  so  geometric,  its  phenomena  so  characteristic 
of  meteorites  exclude  the  idea  that  it  was  the  work  of  man. 

As  to  the  deposit — Tertiary  coal. 

Composition — iron,  carbon,  and  a  small  quantity  of  nickel. 

It  has  the  pitted  surface  that  is  supposed  by  the  faithful  to  be 
characteristic  of  meteorites. 

For  a  full  account  of  this  object,  see  Comptes  Rendus,  103-702. 
The  scientists  who  examined  it  could  reach  no  agreement.  They 
bifurcated:  then  a  compromise  was  suggested;  but  the  compromise 
is  a  product  of  disregard: 

That  it  was  of  true  meteoritic  material,  and  had  not  been  shaped 
by  man; 

That  it  was  not  of  true  meteoritic  material,  but  telluric  iron  that 
had  been  shaped  by  man ; 

That  it  was  true  meteoritic  material  that  had  fallen  from  the 
sky,  but  had  been  shaped  by  man,  after  its  fall. 

The  data,  one  or  more  of  which  must  be  disregarded  by  each  of 
these  three  explanations  are:  "true  meteoritic  material"  and  sur- 
face markings  of  meteorites;  geometric  form;  presence  in  an  an- 
cient deposit;  material  as  hard  as  steel;  absence  upon  this  earth,  in 
Tertiary  times,  of  men  who  could  work  in  material  as  hard  as  steel. 
It  is  said  that,  though  of  "true  meteoritic  material,"  this  object  is 
virtually  a  steel  object. 

St.  Augustine,  with  his  orthodoxy,  was  never  in — well,  very  much 
worse — difficulties  than  are  the  faithful  here.  By  due  disregard  of 
a  datum  or  so,  our  own  acceptance  that  it  was  a  steel  object  that  had 
fallen  from  the  sky  to  this  earth,  in  Tertiary  times,  is  not  forced 
upon  one.  We  offer  ours  as  the  only  synthetic  expression.  For  in- 
stance, in  Science  Gossip,  1887-58,  it  is  described  as  a  meteorite: 
in  this  account  there  is  nothing  alarming  to  the  pious,  because, 
though  everything  else  is  told,  its  geometric  form  is  not  mentioned. 

It's  a  cube.  There  is  a  deep  incision  all  around  it.  Of  its  faces, 
two  that  are  opposite  are  rounded. 

Though  I  accept  that  our  own  expression  can  only  rather  approxi- 
mate to  Truth,  by  the  wideness  of  its  inclusions,  and  because  it 
seems,  of  four  attempts,  to  represent  the  only  complete  synthesis, 
and  can  be  nullified  or  greatly  modified,  by  data  that  we,  too,  have 
somewhere  disregarded,  the  only  means  of  nullification  that  I  can 
think  of  would  be  demonstration  that  this  object  is  a  mass  of  iron 
pyrites,  which  sometimes  forms  geometrically.  But  the  analysis 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  127 

mentions  not  a  trace  of  sulphur.  Of  course  our  weakness,  or  im- 
positiveness,  lies  in  that,  by  any  one  to  whom  it  would  be  agreeable 
to  find  sulphur  in  this  thing,  sulphur  would  be  found  in  it — by  our 
own  intermediatism  there  is  some  sulphur  in  everything,  or  sulphur 
is  only  a  localization  or  emphasis  of  something  that,  unemphasized, 
is  in  all  things. 

So  there  have,  or  haven't,  been  found  upon  this  earth,  things 
that  fell  from  the  sky,  or  that  were  left  behind  by  extra-mundane 
visitors  to  this  earth 

A  yarn  in  the  London  Times,  June  22,  1844:  that  some  work- 
men, quarrying  rock,  close  to  the  Tweed,  about  a  quarter  of  a 
mile  below  Rutherford  Mills,  discovered  a  gold  thread  embedded  in 
the  stone,  at  a  depth  of  8  feet:  that  a  piece  of  the  gold  thread  had 
been  sent  to  the  office  of  the  Kelso  Chronicle. 

Pretty  little  thing;  not  at  all  frowsy;  rather  damnable. 

London  Times,  Dec.  24,  1851: 

That  Hiram  De  Witt,  of  Springfield,  Mass.,  returning  from  Cali- 
fornia, had  brought  with  him  a  piece  of  auriferous  quartz  about 
the  size  of  a  man's  fist.  It  was  accidentally  dropped — split  open 
— nail  in  it.  There  was  a  cut-iron  nail,  size  of  a  six-penny  nail, 
slightly  corroded.  "It  was  entirely  straight  and  had  a  perfect 
head." 

Or — California — ages  ago,  when  auriferous  quartz  was  forming — 
super-carpenter,  million  of  miles  or  so  up  in  the  air — drops  a 
nail. 

To  one  not  an  intermediatist,  it  would  seem  incredible  that  this 
datum,  not  only  of  the  damned,  but  of  the  lowest  of  the  damned, 
or  of  the  journalistic  caste  of  the  accursed,  could  merge  away  with 
something  else  damned  only  by  disregard,  and  backed  by  what  is 
called  "highest  scientific  authority" 

Communication  by  Sir  David  Brewster  (Rept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1845- 

so: 

That  a  nail  had  been  found  in  a  block  of  stone,  from  Kingoodie 
Quarry,  North  Britain.  The  block  in  which  the  nail  was  found 
was  nine  inches  thick,  but  as  to  what  part  of  the  quarry  it  had  come 
from,  there  is  no  evidence — except  that  it  could  not  have  been  from 
the  surface.  The  quarry  had  been  worked  about  twenty  years.  It 
consisted  of  alternate  layers  of  hard  stone  and  a  substance  called 
"till."  The  point  of  the  nail,  quite  eaten  with  rust,  projected  into 
some  "till,"  upon  the  surface  of  the  block  of  stone.  The  rest  of  the 


128  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

nail  lay  upon  the  surface  of  the  stone,  to  within  an  inch  of  the  head 
— that  inch  of  it  was  embedded  in  the  stone. 

Although  its  caste  is  high,  this  is  a  thing  profoundly  of  the  damned 
— sort  of  a  Brahmin  as  regarded  by  a  Baptist.  Its  case  was  stated 
fairly;  Brewster  related  all  circumstances  available  to  him — but 
there  was  no  discussion  at  the  meeting  of  the  British  Association: 
no  explanation  was  offered 

Nevertheless  the  thing  can  be  nullified 

But  the  nullification  that  we  find  is  as  much  against  orthodoxy,  in 
one  respect  as  it  is  against  our  own  expression  that  inclusion  in 
quartz  or  sandstone  indicates  antiquity — or  there  would  have  to  be 
a  revision  of  prevailing  dogmas  upon  quartz  and  sandstone  and  age 
indicated  by  them,  if  the  opposing  data  should  be  accepted.  Of 
course  it  may  be  contended  by  both  the  orthodox  and  us  heretics 
that  the  opposition  is  only  a  yarn  from  a  newspaper.  By  an  odd 
combination,  we  find  our  two  lost  souls  that  have  tried  to  emerge, 
chucked  back  to  perdition  by  one  blow: 

Pop.  Sci.  News,  1884-41: 

That,  according  to  the  Carson  Appeal,  there  had  been  found 
in  a  mine,  quartz  crystals  that  could  have  had  only  15  years  in 
which  to  form:  that,  where  a  mill  had  been  built,  sandstone  had 
been  found,  when  the  mill  was  torn  down,  that  had  hardened  in  12 
years:  that  in  this  sandstone  was  a  piece  of  wood,  "with  a  nail  in 
it." 

Annals  of  Scientific  Discovery,  1853-71: 

That,  at  the  meeting  of  the  British  Association,  1853,  Sir  David 
Brewster  had  announced  that  he  had  to  bring  before  the  meeting, 
an  object  "of  so  incredible  a  nature  that  nothing  short  of  the 
strongest  evidence  was  necessary  to  render  the  statement  at  all 
probable." 

A  crystal  lens  had  been  found  in  the  treasure-house  at  Ninevah. 

In  many  of  the  temples  and  treasure  houses  of  old  civiliza- 
tions upon  this  earth  have  been  preserved  things  that  have  fallen 
from  the  sky — or  meteorites. 

Again  we  have  a  Brahmin.  This  thing  is  buried  alive  in  the  heart 
of  propriety:  it  is  in  the  British  Museum. 

Carpenter,  in  The  Microscope  and  Its  Revelations,  gives  two 
drawings  of  it.  Carpenter  argues  that  it  is  impossible  to  accept 
that  optical  lenses  had  ever  been  made  by  the  ancients.  Never 
occurred  to  him — some  one  a  million  miles  or  so  up  in  the  air — 
looking  through  his  telescope — lens  drops  out. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  129 

This  does  not  appeal  to  Carpenter:  he  says  that  this  object  must 
have  been  an  ornament. 

According  to  Brewster,  it  was  not  an  ornament,  but  "a  true 
optical  lens," 

In  that  case,  in  ruins  of  an  old  civilization  upon  this  earth,  has 
been  found  an  accursed  thing  that  was,  acceptably,  not  a  product 
of  any  old  civilization  indigenous  to  this  earth. 


CHAPTER  X 

EARLY  explorers  have  Florida  mixed  up  with  Newfoundland. 
But  the  confusion  is  worse  than  that  still  earlier.  It  arises 
from  simplicity.  Very  early  explorers  think  that  all  land  westward 
is  one  land,  India:  awareness  of  other  lands  as  well  as  India  comes 
as  a  slow  process.  I  do  not  now  think  of  things  arriving  upon  this 
earth  from  some  especial  other  world.  That  was  my  notion  when  I 
started  to  collect  our  data.  Or,  as  is  a  commonplace  of  observation, 
all  intellection  begins  with  the  illusion  of  homogeneity.  It's  one  of 
Spencer's  data:  we  see  homogeneousness  in  all  things  distant,  or 
with  which  we  have  small  acquaintance.  Advance  from  the  rela- 
tively homogeneous  to  the  relatively  heterogeneous  is  Spencerian 
Philosophy — like  everything  else,  so-called:  not  that  it  was  really 
Spencer's  discovery,  but  was  taken  from  von  Baer,  who,  in  turn, 
was  continuous  with  preceding  evolutionary  speculation.  Our  own 
expression  is  that  all  things  are  acting  to  advance  to  the  homo- 
geneous, or  are  trying  to  localize  Homogeneousness.  Homogeneous- 
ness  is  an  aspect  of  the  Universal,  wherein  it  is  a  state  that  does  not 
merge  away  into  something  else.  We  regard  homogeneousness  as 
an  aspect  of  positiveness,  but  it  is  our  acceptance  that  infinite  frus- 
trations of  attempts  to  positivize  manifest  themselves  in  infinite 
heterogeneity:  so  that  though  things  try  to  localize  homogeneous- 
ness  they  end  up  in  heterogeneity  so  great  that  it  amounts  to  infinite 
dispersion  or  indistinguishability. 

So  all  concepts  are  little  attempted  positivenesses,  but  soon  have 
to  give  in  to  compromise,  modification,  nullification,  merging  away 
into  indistinguishability — unless,  here  and  there,  in  the  world's  his- 
tory, there  may  have  been  a  super-dogmatist,  who,  for  only  an  in- 
finitesimal of  time,  has  been  able  to  hold  out  against  heterogeneity 
or  modification  or  doubt  or  "listening  to  reason,"  or  loss  of  identity 
— in  which  case — instant  translation  to  heaven  or  the  Positive  Ab- 
solute. 

Odd  thing  about  Spencer  is  that  he  never  recognized  that  "homo- 
geneity," "integration,"  and  "definiteness"  are  all  words  for  the 
same  state,  or  the  state  that  we  call  "positiveness."  What  we  call 

130 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  131 

his  mistake  is  in  that  he  regarded  "homogeneousness"  as  nega- 
tive. 

I  began  with  a  notion  of  some  one  other  world,  from  which  ob- 
jects and  substances  have  fallen  to  this  earth;  which  had,  or  which, 
to  less  degree,  has  a  tutelary  interest  in  this  earth;  which  is  now 
attempting  to  communicate  with  this  earth — modifying,  because  of 
data  which  will  pile  up  later,  into  acceptance  that  some  other  world 
is  not  attempting  but  has  been,  for  centuries,  in  communication  with 
a  sect,  perhaps,  or  &  secret  society,  or  certain  esoteric  ones  of  this 
earth's  inhabitants. 

I  lose  a  great  deal  of  hypnotic  power  in  not  being  able  to  con- 
centrate attention  upon  some  one  other  world. 

As  I  have  admitted  before  I'm  intelligent,  as  contrasted  with  the 
orthodox.  I  haven't  the  aristocratic  disregard  of  a  New  York  curator 
or  an  Eskimo  medicine-man. 

I  have  to  dissipate  myself  in  acceptance  of  a  host  of  other  worlds: 
size  of  the  moon,  some  of  them:  one  of  them,  at  least, — tremendous 
thing:  we'll  take  that  up  later.  Vast,  amorphous  aerial  regions,  to 
which  such  definite  words  as  "worlds"  and  "planets"  seem  inappli- 
cable. And  artificial  constructions  that  I  have  called  "super-con- 
structions": one  of  them  about  the  size  of  Brooklyn,  I  should  say, 
off  hand.  And  one  or  more  of  them  wheel-shaped  things,  a  goodly 
number  of  square  miles  in  area. 

I  think  that  earlier  in  this  book,  before  we  liberalized  into  em- 
bracing everything  that  comes  along,  your  indignation,  or  indiges- 
tion would  have  expressed  in  the  notion  that,  if  this  were  so, 
astronomers  would  have  seen  these  other  worlds  and  regions  and  vast 
geometric  constructions.  You'd  have  had  that  notion:  you'd  have 
stopped  there. 

But  the  attempt  to  stop  is  saying  "enough"  to  the  insatiable.  In 
cosmic  punctuation  there  are  no  periods:  illusion  of  periods  is  in- 
complete view  of  colons  and  semi-colons. 

We  can't  stop  with  the  notion  that  if  there  were  such  phenomena, 
astronomers  would  have  seen  them.  Because  of  our  experience  with 
suppression  and  disregard,  we  suspect,  before  we  go  into  the  sub- 
ject at  all,  that  astronomers  have  seen  them;  that  navigators  and 
meteorologists  have  seen  them;  that  individual  scientists  and  other 
trained  observers  have  seen  them  many  times 

That  it  is  the  System  that  has  excluded  data  of  them. 

As  to  the  Law  of  Gravitation,  and  astronomers'  formulas,  re- 
member that  these  formulas  worked  out  in  the  time  of  La  Place  as 


I32  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

well  as  they  do  now.  But  there  are  hundreds  of  planetary  bodies 
now  known  that  were  then  not  known.  So  a  few  hundred  worlds 
more  of  ours  won't  make  any  difference.  La  Place  knew  of  about 
only  thirty  bodies  in  this  solar  system:  about  six  hundred  are  recog- 
nized now 

What  are  the  discoveries  of  geology  and  biology  to  a  theologian? 

His  formulas  still  work  out  as  well  as  they  ever  did. 

If  the  Law  of  Gravitation  could  be  stated  as  a  real  utterance,  it 
might  be  a  real  resistance  to  us.  But  we  are  told  only  that  gravita- 
tion is  gravitation.  Of  course  to  an  intermediatist,  nothing  can  be 
defined  except  in  terms  of  itself — but  even  the  orthodox,  in  what 
seems  to  me  to  be  the  innate  premonitions  of  realness,  not  founded 
upon  experience,  agree  that  to  define  a  thing  in  terms  of  itself  is  not 
real  definition.  It  is  said  that  by  gravitation  is  meant  the  attrac- 
tion of  all  things  proportionately  to  mass  and  inversely  as  the 
square  of  the  distance.  Mass  would  mean  inter-attraction  holding 
together  final  particles,  if  there  were  final  particles.  Then,  until 
final  particles  be  discovered,  only  one  term  of  this  expression  sur- 
vives, or  mass  is  attraction.  But  distance  is  only  extent  of  mass, 
unless  one  holds  out  for  absolute  vacuum  among  planets,  a  position 
against  which  we  could  bring  a  host  of  data.  But  there  is  no  possi- 
ble means  of  expressing  that  gravitation  is  anything  other  than  at- 
traction. So  there  is  nothing  to  resist  us  but  such  a  phantom  as — 
that  gravitation  is  the  gravitation  of  all  gravitations  proportionately 
to  gravitation  and  inversely  as  the  square  of  gravitation.  In  a 
quasi-existence,  nothing  more  sensible  than  this  can  be  said  upon 
any  so-called  subject — perhaps  there  are  higher  approximations  to 
ultimate  sensibleness. 

Nevertheless  we  seem  to  have  a  feeling  that  with  the  System 
against  us  we  have  a  kind  of  resistance  here.  We'd  have  felt  so 
formerly,  at  any  rate:  I  think  the  Dr.  Grays  and  Prof.  Hitchcocks 
have  modified  our  trustfulness  toward  indistinguishability.  As  to 
the  perfection  of  this  System  that  quasi-opposes  us  and  the  in- 
fallibility of  its  mathematics — as  if  there  could  be  real  mathematics 
in  a  mode  cf  seeming  where  twice  two  are  not  four — we've  been  told 
over  and  over  of  their  vindication  in  the  discovery  of  Neptune. 

I'm  afraid  that  the  course  we're  taking  will  turn  out  like  every 
other  development.  We  began  humbly,  admitting  that  we're  of  the 

damned 

But  our  eyebrows 

Just  a  faint  flicker  in  them,  or  in  one  of  them,  every  time  we 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  133 

hear  of  the  "triumphal  discovery  of  Neptune" — this  "monumental 
achievement  of  theoretical  astronomy,"  as  the  text  books  call  it. 

The  whole  trouble  is  that  we've  looked  it  up. 

The  text-books  omit  this: 

That,  instead  of  the  orbit  of  Neptune  agreeing  with  the  calcula- 
tions of  Adams  and  Leverrier,  it  was  so  different — that  Leverrier 
said  that  it  was  not  the  planet  of  his  calculations. 

Later  it  was  thought  best  to  say  no  more  upon  that  subject. 

The  text-books  omit  this: 

That,  in  1846,  every  one  who  knew  a  sine  from  a  cosine  was  out 
sining  and  cosining  for  a  planet  beyond  Uranus. 

Two  of  them  guessed  right. 

To  some  minds,  even  after  Leverrier's  own  rejection  of  Neptune, 
the  word  "guessed"  may  be  objectionable — but,  according  to  Prof. 
Peirce,  of  Harvard,  the  calculations  of  Adams  and  Leverrier  would 
have  applied  quite  as  well  to  positions  many  degrees  from  the  po- 
sition of  Neptune. 

Or  for  Prof.  Peirce's  demonstration  that  the  discovery  of  Neptune 
was  only  a  "happy  accident,"  see  Proc.  Amer.  Acad.  Sciences,  1-65. 

For  references,  see  Lowell's  Evolution  of  Worlds. 

Or  comets:  another  nebulous  resistance  to  our  own  notions.  As 
to  eclipses,  I  have  notes  upon  several  of  them  that  did  not  occur 
upon  scheduled  time,  though  with  differences  only  of  seconds — and 
one  delightful  lost  soul,  deep-buried,  but  buried  in  the  ultra-respect- 
able records  of  the  Royal  Astronomical  Society,  upon  an  eclipse  that 
did  not  occur  at  all.  That  delightful,  ultra-sponsored  thing  of  per- 
dition is  too  good  and  malicious  to  be  dismissed  with  passing  notice: 
we'll  have  him  later. 

Throughout  the  history  of  astronomy,  every  comet  that  has  come 
back  upon  predicted  time — not  that,  essentially,  there  was  anything" 
more  abstruse  about  it  than  is  a  prediction  that  you  can  make 
of  a  postman's  periodicities  to-morrow — was  advertised  for  all  it 
was  worth.  It's  the  way  reputations  are  worked  up  for  fortune- 
tellers by  the  faithful.  The  comets  that  didn't  come  back — omitted 
or  explained.  Or  Encke's  comet.  It  came  back  slower  and  slower. 
But  the  astronomers  explained.  Be  almost  absolutely  sure  of  that: 
they  explained.  They  had  it  all  worked  out  and  formulated  and 
"proved"  why  that  comet  was  coming  back  slower  and  slower — and 
there  the  dam  thing  began  coming  faster  and  faster. 

Halley's  comet. 


134  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Astronomy — "the  perfect  science,  as  we  astronomers  like  to  call 
it."  (Jacoby.) 

It's  my  own  notion  that  if,  in  a  real  existence,  an  astronomer 
could  not  tell  one  longitude  from  another,  he'd  be  sent  back  to  this 
purgatory  of  ours  until  he  could  meet  that  simple  requirement. 

Halley  was  sent  to  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  to  determine  its 
longitude.  He  got  it  degrees  wrong.  He  gave  to  Africa's  noble 
Roman  promontory  a  retrousse  twist  that  would  take  the  pride  out 
of  any  Kaffir. 

We  hear  everlastingly  of  Halley's  comet.  It  came  back — maybe. 
But,  unless  we  look  the  matter  up  in  contemporaneous  records,  we 
hear  nothing  of — the  Leonids,  for  instance.  By  the  same  methods 
as  those  by  which  Halley's  comet  was  predicted,  the  Leonids  were 
predicted.  Nov.,  1898 — no  Leonids.  It  was  explained.  They  had 
been  perturbed.  They  would  appear  in  November,  1899.  Nov., 
1899 — Nov.,  1900 — no  Leonids. 

My  notion  of  astronomic  accuracy: 

Who  could  not  be  a  prize  marksman,  if  only  his  hits  be  re- 
corded? 

As  to  Halley's  comet,  of  1910 — everybody  now  swears  he  saw 
it.  He  has  to  perjure  himself:  otherwise  he'd  be  accused  of  having 
no  interest  in  great,  inspiring  things  that  he's  never  given  any  at- 
tention to. 

Regard  this: 

That  there  never  is  a  moment  when  there  is  not  some  comet  in 
the  sky.  Virtually  there  is  no  year  in  which  several  new  comets 
are  not  discovered,  so  plentiful  are  they.  Luminous  fleas  on  a  vast 
black  dog — in  popular  impressions,  there  is  no  realization  of  the  ex- 
tent to  which  this  solar  system  is  flea-bitten. 

If  a  comet  have  not  the  orbit  that  astronomers  have  predicted 
—perturbed.  If— like  Halley's  comet— it  be  late— even  a  year  late 
— perturbed.  When  a  train  is  an  hour  late,  we  have  small  opinion 
of  the  predictions  of  time  tables.  When  a  comet's  a  year  late,  all 
we  ask  is— that  it  be  explained.  We  hear  of  the  inflation  and  ar- 
rogance of  astronomers.  My  own  acceptance  is  not  that  they  are 
imposing  upon  us:  that  they  are  requiting  us.  For  many  of  us 
priests  no  longer  function  to  give  us  seeming  rapport  with  Perfec- 
tion, Infallibility — the  Positive  Absolute.  Astronomers  have 
stepped  forward  to  fill  a  vacancy — with  quasi-phantomosity — but, 
in  our  acceptance,  with  a  higher  approximation  to  substantiality 
than  had  the  attenuations  that  preceded  them.  I  should  say,  my- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  135 

self,  that  all  that  we  call  progress  is  not  so  much  response  to  "urge" 
as  it  is  response  to  a  hiatus — or  if  you  want  something  to  grow 
somewhere,  dig  out  everything  else  in  its  area.  So  I  have  to  accept 
that  the  positive  assurances  of  astronomers  are  necessary  to  us,  or 
the  blunderings,  evasions  and  disguises  of  astronomers  would  never 
be  tolerated:  that,  given  such  latitude  as  they  are  permitted  to 
take,  they  could  not  be  very  disastrously  mistaken.  Suppose  the 
comet  called  Halley's  had  not  appeared 

Early  in  1910,  a  far  more  important  comet  than  the  anaemic  lu- 
minosity said  to  be  Halley's,  appeared.  It  was  so  brilliant  that  it 
was  visible  in  daylight.  The  astronomers  would  have  been  saved 
anyway.  If  this  other  comet  did  not  have  the  predicted  orbit — 
perturbation.  If  you're  going  to  Coney  Island,  and  predict  there'll 
be  a  special  kind  of  a  pebble  on  the  beach,  I  don't  see  how  you 
can  disgrace  yourself,  if  some  other  pebble  will  do  just  as  well — 
because  the  feeble  thing  said  to  have  been  seen  in  1910  was  no 
more  in  accord  with  the  sensational  descriptions  given  out  by 
astronomers  in  advance  than  is  a  pale  pebble  with  a  brick-red 
bowlder. 

I  predict  that  next  Wednesday,  a  large  Chinaman,  in  evening 
clothes,  will  cross  Broadway,  at  42nd  Street,  at  9  p.  m.  He  doesn't, 
but  a  tubercular  Jap,  in  a  sailor's  uniform  does  cross  Broadway,  at 
35th  Street,  Friday,  at  noon.  Well,  a  Jap  is  a  perturbed  China- 
man, and  clothes  are  clothes. 

I  remember  the  terrifying  predictions  made  by  the  honest  and 
credulous  astronomers,  who  must  have  been  themselves  hypnotized, 
or  they  could  not  have  hypnotized  the  rest  of  us,  in  1909.  Wills 
were  made.  Human  life  might  be  swept  from  this  planet.  In  quasi- 
existence,  which  is  essentially  Hibernian,  that  would  be  no  reason 
why  wills  should  not  be  made.  The  less  excitable  of  us  did  expect 
at  least  some  pretty  good  fireworks. 

I  have  to  admit  that  it  is  said  that,  in  New  York,  a  light  was  seen 
in  the  sky. 

It  was  about  as  terrifying  as  the  scratch  of  a  match  on  the  seat  of 
some  breeches  half  a  mile  away. 

It  was  not  on  time. 

Though  I  have  heard  that  a  faint  nebulosity,  which  I  did  not  see, 
myself,  though  I  looked  when  I  was  told  to  look,  was  seen  in  the 
sky,  it  appeared  several  days  after  the  time  predicted. 

A  hypnotized  host  of  imbeciles  of  us:  told  to  look  up  at  the  sky: 
we  did — like  a  lot  of  pointers  hypnotized  by  a  partridge. 


136  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

The  effect: 

Almost  everybody  now  swears  that  he  saw  Halley's  comet,  and 
that  it  was  a  glorious  spectacle. 

An  interesting  circumstance  here  is  that  seemingly  we  are  trying 
to  discredit  astronomers  because  astronomers  oppose  us — that's  not 
my  impression.  We  shall  be  in  the  Brahmin  caste  of  the  hell  of 
the  Baptists.  Almost  all  our  data,  in  some  regiments  of  this  pro- 
cession, are  observations  by  astronomers,  few  of  them  mere  amateur 
astronomers.  It  is  the  System  that  opposes  us.  It  is  the  System 
that  is  suppressing  astronomers.  I  think  we  pity  them  in  their 
captivity.  Ours  is  not  malice — in  a  positive  sense.  It's  chivalry — 
somewhat.  Unhappy  astronomers  looking  out  from  high  towers  in 
which  they  are  imprisoned — we  appear  upon  the  horizon. 

But,  as  I  have  said,  our  data  do  not  relate  to  some  especial  other 
world.  I  mean  very  much  what  a  savage  upon  an  ocean  island 
might  vaguely  think  of  in  his  speculations — not  upon  some  other 
land,  but  complexes  of  continents  and  their  phenomena:  cities,  fac- 
tories in  cities,  means  of  communication 

Now  all  the  other  savages  would  know  of  a  few  vessels  sailing 
in  their  regular  routes,  passing  this  island  in  regularized  periodicities. 
The  tendency  in  these  minds  would  be  expression  of  the  universal 
tendency  toward  positivism — or  Completeness — or  conviction  that 
these  few  regularized  vessels  constituted  all.  Now  I  think  of  some 
especial  savage  who  suspects  otherwise — because  he's  very  backward 
and  unimaginative  and  insensible  to  the  beautiful  ideals  of  the 
others:  not  piously  occupied,  like  the  others,  in  bowing  before  im- 
pressive-looking sticks  of  wood;  dishonestly  taking  time  for  his 
speculations,  while  the  others  are  patriotically  witch-finding.  So 
the  other  higher  and  nobler  savages  know  about  the  few  regularized 
vessels:  know  when  to  expect  them;  have  their  periodicities  all 
worked  out ;  just  about  when  vessels  will  pass,  or  eclipse  each  other — 
explaining  that  all  vagaries  were  due  to  atmospheric  conditions. 

They'd  come  out  strong  in  explaining. 

You  can't  read  a  book  upon  savages  without  noting  what  reso- 
lute explainers  they  are. 

They'd  say  that  all  this  mechanism  was  founded  upon  the  mutual 
attraction  of  the  vessels — deduced  from  the  fall  of  a  monkey  from 
a  palm  tree — or,  if  not  that,  that  devils  were  pushing  the  vessels — 
something  of  the  kind. 

Storms. 

Debris,  not  from  these  vessels,  cast  up  by  the  waves. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  137 

Disregarded. 

How  can  one  think  of  something  and  something  else,  too? 

I'm  in  the  state  of  mind  of  a  savage  who  might  find  upon  a  shore, 
washed  up  by  the  same  storm,  buoyant  parts  of  a  piano  and  a 
paddle  that  was  carved  by  cruder  hands  than  his  own:  something 
light  and  summery  from  India,  and  a  fur  overcoat  from  Russia — 
or  all  science,  though  approximating  wider  and  wider,  is  attempt 
to  conceive  of  India  in  terms  of  an  ocean  island,  and  of  Russia  in 
terms  of  India  so  interpreted.  Though  I  am  trying  to  think  of 
Russia  and  India  in  world-wide  terms,  I  cannot  think  that  that,  or 
the  universalizing  of  the  local,  is  cosmic  purpose.  The  higher  ideal- 
ist is  the  positivist  who  tries  to  localize  the  universal,  and  is  in  ac- 
cord with  cosmic  purpose:  the  super-dogmatist  of  a  local  savage  who 
can  hold  out,  without  a  flurry  of  doubt,  that  a  piano  washed  up  on 
a  beach  is  the  trunk  of  a  palm  tree  that  a  shark  has  bitten,  leaving 
his  teeth  in  it.  So  we  fear  for  the  soul  of  Dr.  Gray,  because,  he 
did  not  devote  his  whole  life  to  that  one  stand  that,  whether  pos- 
sible or  inconceivable,  thousands  of  fishes  had  been  cast  from  one 
bucket. 

So,  unfortunately  for  myself,  if  salvation  be  desirable,  I  look  out 
widely  but  amorphously,  indefinitely  and  heterogeneously.  If  I 
say  I  conceive  of  another  world  that  is  now  in  secret  communica- 
tion with  certain  esoteric  inhabitants  of  this  earth,  I  say  I  conceive 
of  still  other  worlds  that  are  trying  to  establish  communication  with 
all  the  inhabitants  of  this  earth.  I  fit  my  notions  to  the  data  I  find. 
That  is  supposed  to  be  the  right  and  logical  and  scientific  thing  to 
do;  but  it  is  no  way  to  approximate  to  form,  system,  organization. 
Then  I  think  I  conceive  of  other  worlds  and  vast  structures  that 
pass  us  by,  within  a  few  miles,  without  the  slightest  desire  to  com- 
municate, quite  as  tramp  vessels  pass  many  islands  without  par- 
ticularizing one  from  another.  Then  I  think  I  have  data  of  a  vast 
construction  that  has  often  come  to  this  earth,  dipped  into  an  ocean, 
submerged  there  a  while,  then  going  away — Why?  I'm  not 
absolutely  sure.  How  would  an  Eskimo  explain  a  vessel,  sending 
ashore  for  coal,  which  is  plentiful  upon  some  Arctic  beaches,  though 
of  unknown  use  to  the  natives,  then  sailing  away,  with  no  interest  in 
the  natives? 

A  great  difficulty  in  trying  to  understand  vast  constructions  that 
show  no  interest  in  us: 

The  notion  that  we  must  be  interesting. 

I  accept  that,  though  we're  usually  avoided,  probably  for  moral 


i38  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

reasons,  sometimes  this  earth  has  been  visited  by  explorers.  I 
think  that  the  notion  that  there  have  been  extra-mundane  visitors  to 
China,  within  what  we  call  the  historic  period,  will  be  only  or- 
dinarily absurd,  when  we  come  to  that  datum. 

I  accept  that  some  of  the  other  worlds  are  of  conditions  very 
similar  to  our  own.  I  think  of  others  that  are  very  different — so  that 
visitors  from  them  could  not  live  here — without  artificial  adapta- 
tions. 

How  some  of  them  could  breathe  our  attenuated  air,  if  they  came 
from  a  gelatinous  atmosphere 

Masks. 

The  masks  that  have  been  found  in  ancient  deposits. 

Most  of  them  are  of  stone,  and  are  said  to  have  been  ceremonial 
regalia  of  savages 

But  the  mask  that  was  found  in  Sullivan  County,  Missouri,  in 
1879  (American  Antiquarian,  3-336). 

It  is  made  of  iron  and  silver. 


CHAPTER  XI 

ONE  of  the  dam-dest  in  our  whole  saturnalia  of  the  accursed 
Because  it  is  hopeless  to  try  to  shake  off  an  excommunica- 
tion only  by  saying  that  we're  damned  by  blacker  things  than  our- 
selves; and  that  the  damned  are  those  who  admit  they're  of  the 
damned.  Inertia  and  hypnosis  are  too  strong  for  us.  We  say  that: 
then  we  go  right  on  admitting  we're  of  the  damned.  It  is  only  by 
being  more  nearly  real  that  we  can  sweep  away  the  quasi-things  that 
oppose  us.  Of  course,  as  a  whole,  we  have  considerable  amorphous- 
ness,  but  we  are  thinking  now  of  "individual"  acceptances.  Wide- 
ness  is  an  aspect  of  Universalness  or  Realness.  If  our  syntheses  dis- 
regard fewer  data  than  do  opposing  syntheses — which  are  often  not 
syntheses  at  all,  but  mere  consideration  of  some  one  circumstance 
— less  widely  synthetic  things  fade  away  before  us.  Harmony  is  an 
aspect  of  the  Universal,  by  which  we  mean  Realness.  If  we  approxi- 
mate more  highly  to  harmony  among  the  parts  of  an  expression  and 
to  all  available  circumstances  of  an  occurrence,  the  self-contradictors 
turn  hazy.  Solidity  is  an  aspect  of  realness.  We  pile  them  up,  and 
we  pile  them  up,  or  they  pass  and  pass  and  pass:  things  that  bulk 

large  as  they  march  by,  supporting  and  solidifying  one  another 

And  still,  and  for  regiments  to  come,  hypnosis  and  inertia  rule 

One  of  the  dam-dest  of  our  data: 

In  the  Scientific  American,  Sept.  10,  1910,  Charles  F.  Holder 
writes: 

"Many  years  ago,  a  strange  stone  resembling  a  meteorite,  fell 
into  the  Valley  of  the  Yaqui,  Mexico,  and  the  sensational  story  went 
from  one  end  to  the  other  of  the  country  that  a  stone  bearing  hu- 
man inscriptions  had  descended  to  the  earth." 

The  bewildering  observation  here  is  Mr.  Holder's  assertion  that 
this  stone  did  fall.  It  seems  to  me  that  he  must  mean  that  it  fell 
by  dislodgment  from  a  mountain  side  into  a  valley — but  we  shall  see 
that  it  was  such  a  marked  stone  that  very  unlikely  would  it  have 
been  unknown  to  dwellers  in  a  valley,  if  it  had  been  reposing  upon 
a  mountain  side  above  them.  It  may  have  been  carelessness:  intent 

139 


140  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

may  have  been  to  say  that  a  sensational  story  of  a  strange  stone 
said  to  have  fallen,  etc. 

This  stone  was  reported,  by  Major  Frederick  Burnham,  of  the 
British  Army.  Later  Major  Burnham  re-visited  it,  and  Mr.  Holder 
accompanied  him,  their  purpose  to  decipher  the  inscriptions  upon 
it,  if  possible. 

"This  stone  was  a  brown,  igneous  rock,  its  longest  axis  about 
eight  feet,  and  on  the  eastern  face,  which  had  an  angle  of  about 
forty-five  degrees,  was  the  deep-cut  inscription." 

Mr.  Holder  says  that  he  recognized  familiar  Mayan  symbols  in 
the  inscription.  His  method  was  the  usual  method  by  which  any- 
thing can  be  "identified"  as  anything  else:  that  is  to  pick  out  what- 
ever is  agreeable  and  disregard  the  rest.  He  says  that  he  has  dem- 
onstrated that  most  of  the  symbols  are  Mayan.  One  of  our  interme- 
diatist  pseudo-principles  is  that  any  way  of  demonstrating  any- 
thing is  just  as  good  a  way  of  demonstrating  anything  else.  By  Mr. 
Holder's  method  we  could  demonstrate  that  we're  Mayan — if  that 
should  be  a  source  of  pride  to  us.  One  of  the  characters  upon  this 
stone  is  a  circle  within  a  circle — similar  character  found  by  Mr. 
Holder  in  a  Mayan  manuscript.  There  are  two  6's.  6's  can  be 
found  in  Mayan  manuscripts.  A  double  scroll.  There  are  dots 
and  there  are  dashes.  Well,  then,  we,  in  turn,  disregard  the  circle 
within  a  circle  and  the  double  scroll  and  emphasize  that  6's  occur 
in  this  book,  and  that  dots  are  plentiful,  and  would  be  more  plentiful 
if  it  were  customary  to  use  the  small  "i"  for  the  first  personal  pro- 
noun— that  when  it  comes  to  dashes — that's  demonstrated:  we're 
Mayan. 

I  suppose  the  tendency  is  to  feel  that  we're  sneering  at  some 
valuable  archaeologic  work,  and  that  Mr.  Holder  did  make  a  veritable 
identification. 

He  writes: 

"I  submitted  the  photographs  to  the  Field  Museum  and  the 
Smithsonian  and  one  or  two  others,  and,  to  my  surprise,  the  reply 
was  that  they  could  make  nothing  out  of  it." 

Our  indefinite  acceptance,  by  preponderance  of  three  or  four 
groups  of  museum-experts  against  one  person,  is  that  a  stone  bearing 
inscriptions  unassimilable  with  any  known  language  upon  this  earth, 
is  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky.  Another  poor  wretch  of  an 
outcast  belonging  here  is  noted  in  the  Scientific  American,  48-261: 
that,  of  an  object,  or  a  meteorite,  that  fell  Feb.  16,  1883,  near 
Brescia,  Italy,  a  false  report  was  circulated  that  one  of  the  frag- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  141 

ments  bore  the  impress  of  a  hand.  That's  all  that  is  findable  by  me 
upon  this  mere  gasp  of  a  thing.  Intermediatistically,  my  acceptance 
is  that,  though  in  the  course  of  human  history,  there  have  been 
some  notable  approximations,  there  never  has  been  a  real  liar:  that 
he  could  not  survive  in  intermediateness,  where  everything  merges 
away  or  has  its  pseudo-base  in  something  else — would  be  instantly 
translated  to  the  Negative  Absolute.  So  my  acceptance  is  that, 
though  curtly  dismissed,  there  was  something  to  base  upon  in  this 
report;  that  there  were  unusual  markings  upon  this  object.  Of 
course  that  is  not  to  jump  to  the  conclusion  that  they  were  cunei- 
form characters  that  looked  like  finger  prints. 

Altogether,  I  think  that  in  some  of  our  past  expressions,  we  must 
have  been  very  efficient,  if  the  experience  of  Mr.  Symons  be  typical, 
so  indefinite  are  we  becoming  here.  Just  here  we  are  interested 
in  many  things  that  have  been  found,  especially  in  the  United  States, 
which  speak  of  a  civilization,  or  of  many  civilizations  not  indigenous 
to  this  earth.  One  trouble  is  in  trying  to  decide  whether  they  fell 
here  from  the  sky,  or  were  left  behind  by  visitors  from  other  worlds. 
We  have  a  notion  that  there  have  been  disasters  aloft,  and  that  coins 
have  dropped  here:  that  inhabitants  of  this  earth  found  them  or  saw 
them  fall,  and  then  made  coins  imitatively:  it  may  be  that  coins 
were  showered  here  by  something  of  a  tutelary  nature  that  under- 
took to  advance  us  from  the  stage  of  barter  to  the  use  of  a  medium. 
If  coins  should  be  identified  as  Roman  coins,  weVe  had  so  much 
experience  with  "identifications"  that  we  know  a  phantom  when  we 
see  one — but,  even  so,  how  could  Roman  coins  have  got  to  North 
America — far  in  the  interior  of  North  America — or  buried  under 
the  accumulation,  of  centuries,  of  soil — unless  they  did  drop  from — 
wherever  the  first  Romans  came  from?  Ignatius  Donnelly,  in 
"Atlantis,"  gives  a  list  of  objects  that  have  been  found  in  mounds 
that  are  supposed  to  antedate  all  European  influence  in  America: 
lathe-made  articles,  such  as  traders — from  somewhere — would  sup- 
ply to  savages — marks  of  the  lathe  said  to  be  unmistakable.  Said 
to  be:  of  course  we  can't  accept  that  anything  is  unmistakable. 
In  the  Rept.  Smtthson.  Inst.,  1881-619,  there  is  an  account,  by 
Charles  C.  Jones,  of  two  silver  crosses  that  were  found  in  Georgia. 
They  are  skillfully  made,  highly  ornamented  crosses,  but  are  not 
conventional  crucifixes:  all  arms  of  equal  length.  Mr.  Jones  is  a 
good  positivist — that  De  Sota  had  halted  at  the  "precise"  spot  where 
these  crosses  were  found.  But  the  spirit  of  negativeness  that  lurks 
in  all  things  said  to  be  "precise"  shows  itself  in  that  upon  one  of 


I42  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

these  crosses  is  an  inscription  that  has  no  meaning  in  Spanish  or  any 
other  known,  terrestrial  language: 

"IYNKICIDU,"  according  to  Mr.  Jones.  He  thinks  that  this 
is  a  name,  and  that  there  is  an  aboriginal  ring  to  it,  though  I  should 
say,  myself,  that  he  was  thinking  of  the  far-distant  Incas:  that  the 
Spanish  donor  cut  on  the  cross  the  name  of  an  Indian  to  whom  it 
was  presented.  But  we  look  at  the  inscription  ourselves  and  see 
that  the  letters  said  to  be  "C"  and  "D"  are  turned  the  wrong  way, 
and  that  the  letter  said  to  be  "K"  is  not  only  turned  the  wrong  way, 
but  is  upside  down. 

It  is  difficult  to  accept  that  the  remarkable,  the  very  extensive, 
copper  mines  in  the  region  of  Lake  Superior,  were  ever  the  works 
of  American  aborigines.  Despite  the  astonishing  extent  of  these 
mines,  nothing  has  ever  been  found  to  indicate  that  the  region  was 
ever  inhabited  by  permanent  dwellers — ".  .  .  not  a  vestige  of  a 
dwelling,  a  skeleton,  or  a  bone  has  been  found."  The  Indians  have 
no  traditions  relating  to  the  mines.  (Amer.  Antiquarian,  25-258.) 
I  think  that  we've  had  visitors:  that  they  have  come  here  for  copper, 
for  instance.  As  to  other  relics  of  them — but  we  now  come  upon 
frequency  of  a  merger  that  has  not  so  often  appeared  before: 

Fraudulency. 

Hair  called  real  hair — then  there  are  wigs.  Teeth  called  real 
teeth — then  there  are  false  teeth.  Official  money — counterfeit  money. 
It's  the  bane  of  psychic  research.  If  there  be  psychic  phenomena, 
there  must  be  fraudulent  psychic  phenomena.  So  desperate  is  the 
situation  here  that  Carrington  argues  that,  even  if  Palladino  be 
caught  cheating,  that  is  not  to  say  that  all  her  phenomena  are 
fraudulent.  My  own  version  is:  that  nothing  indicates  anything, 
in  a  positive  sense,  because,  in  a  positive  sense,  there  is  nothing  to  be 
indicated.  Everything  that  is  called  true  must  merge  away  in- 
distinguishably  into  something  called  false.  Both  are  expressions 
of  the  same  underlying  quasiness,  and  are  continuous.  Fraudulent 
antiquarian  relics  are  very  common,  but  they  are  not  more  common 
than  are  fraudulent  paintings. 

W.  S.  Forest,  "Historical  Sketches  of  Norfolk,  Virginia": 

That,  in  Sept.,  1833,  when  some  workmen,  near  Norfolk,  were 
boring  for  water,  a  coin  was  drawn  up  from  a  depth  of  about  30  feet. 
It  was  about  the  size  of  an  English  shilling,  but  oval — an  oval  disk, 
if  not  a  coin.  The  figures  upon  it  were  distinct,  and  represented  "a 
warrior  or  hunter  and  other  characters,  apparently  of  Roman 
origin." 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  143 

The  means  of  exclusion  would  probably  be — men  digging  a  hole 
— no  one  else  looking:  one  of  them  drops  a  coin  into  the  hole — as  to 
where  he  got  a  strange  coin,  remarkable  in  shape  even — that's  dis- 
regarded. Up  comes  the  coin — expressions  of  astonishment  from  the 
evil  one  who  had  dropped  it. 

However  the  antiquarians  have  missed  this  coin.  I  can  find  no 
other  mention  of  it. 

Another  coin.    Also  a  little  study  in  the  genesis  of  a  prophet. 

In  the  American  Antiquarian,  16-313,  is  copied  a  story  by 
a  correspondent  to  the  Detroit  News,  of  a  copper  coin  about  the 
size  of  a  two-cent  piece,  said  to  have  been  found  in  a  Michigan 
mound.  The  Editor  says  merely  that  he  does  not  endorse  the  find. 
Upon  this  slender  basis,  he  buds  out,  in  the  next  number  of  the 
Antiquarian: 

"The  coin  turns  out,  as  we  predicted,  to  be  a  fraud." 

You  can  imagine  the  scorn  of  Elijah,  or  any  of  the  old  more  nearly* 
real  prophets. 

Or  all  things  are  tried  by  the  only  kind  of  jurisprudence  we  have 
in  quasi-existence: 

Presumed  to  be  innocent  until  convicted — but  they're  guilty. 

The  Editor's  reasoning  is  as  phantom-like  as  my  own,  or  St. 
Paul's,  or  Darwin's.  The  coin  is  condemned  because  it  came  from 
the  same  region  from  which,  a  few  years  before,  had  come  pottery 
that  had  been  called  fraudulent.  The  pottery  had  been  condemned 
because  it  was  condemnable. 

Scientifc  American,  June  17,  1882: 

That  a  farmer,  in  Cass  Co.,  111.,  had  picked  up,  on  his  farm,  a 
bronze  coin,  which  was  sent  to  Prof.  F.  F.  Hilder,  of  St.  Louis, 
who  identified  it  as  a  coin  of  Antiochus  IV.  Inscription  said  to 
be  in  ancient  Greek  characters:  translated  as  "King  Antiochus 
Epiphanes  (Illustrious)  the  Victorious."  Sounds  quite  definite  and 
convincing — but  we  have  some  more  translations  coming. 

In  the  American  Pioneer,  2-169,  are  shown  two  faces  of  a 
copper  coin,  with  characters  very  much  like  those  upon  the  Grave 
Creek  stone — which,  with  translations,  we'll  take  up  soon.  This 
coin  is  said  to  have  been  found  in  Connecticut,  in  1843. 

"Records  of  the  Past,"  12-182: 

•  That,  early  in  1913,  a  coin,  said  to  be  a  Roman  coin,  was  re- 
ported as  discovered  in  an  Illinois  mound.  It  was  sent  to  Dr. 
Emerson,  of  the  Art  Institute,  of  Chicago.  His  opinion  was  that 
the  coin  is  "of  the  rare  mintage  of  Domitius  Domitianus,  Emperor 


144  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

in  Egypt."  As  to  its  discovery  in  an  Illinois  mound,  Dr.  Emerson 
disclaims  responsibility.  But  what  strikes  me  here  is  that  a  joker 
should  not  have  been  satisfied  with  an  ordinary  Roman  coin.  Where 
did  he  get  a  rare  coin,  and  why  was  it  not  missed  from  some  col- 
lection? I  have  looked  over  numismatic  journals  enough  to  accept 
that  the  whereabouts  of  every  rare  coin  in  any  one's  possession  is 
known  to  coin-collectors.  Seems  to  me  nothing  left  but  to  call  this 
another  "identification." 

Proc.  Amer.  Phil.  Soc.,  12-224: 

That,  in  July,  1871,  a  letter  was  received  from  Mr.  Jacob  W. 
Moffit,  of  Chillicothe,  111.,  enclosing  a  photograph  of  a  coin,  which 
he  said  had  been  brought  up,  by  him,  while  boring,  from  a  depth  of 
120  feet. 

Of  course,  by  conventional  scientific  standards,  such  depth  has 
some  extraordinary  meaning.  Paleontologists,  geologists,  and 
archaeologists  consider  themselves  reasonable  in  arguing  ancient 
origin  of  the  far-buried.  We  only  accept:  depth  is  a  pseudo-stand- 
ard with  us;  one  earthquake  could  bury  a  coin  of  recent  mintage  120 
feet  below  the  surface. 

According  to  a  writer  in  the  Proceedings,  the  coin  is  uniform 
in  thickness,  and  had  never  been  hammered  out  by  savages — "there 
are  other  tokens  of  the  machine  shop." 

But  according  to  Prof.  Leslie,  it  is  an  astrologic  amulet.  "There  are 
upon  it  the  signs  of  Pisces  and  Leo." 

Or,  with  due  disregard,  you  can  find  signs  of  your  great  grand- 
mother, or  of  the  Crusades,  or  of  the  Mayans,  upon  anything  that 
ever  came  from  Chillicothe  or  from  a  five  and  ten  cent  store. 
Anything  that  looks  like  a  cat  and  a  gold  fish  looks  like  Leo  and 
Pisces:  but,  by  due  suppressions  and  distortions  there's  nothing  that 
can't  be  made  to  look  like  a  cat  and  a  gold  fish.  I  fear  me  we're 
turning  a  little  irritable  here.  To  be  damned  by  slumbering  giants 
and  interesting  little  harlots  and  clowns  who  rank  high  in  their  pro- 
fession is  at  least  supportable  to  our  vanity;  but,  we  find  that  the 
anthropologists  are  of  the  slums  of  the  divine,  or  of  an  archaic  kinder- 
garten of  intellectuality,  and  it  is  very  unflattering  to  find  a  mess  of 
moldy  infants  sitting  in  judgment  upon  us. 

Prof.  Leslie  then  finds,  as  arbitrarily  as  one  might  find  that  some 
joker  put  the  Brooklyn  Bridge  where  it  is,  that  "the  piece  was  placed 
there  as  a  practical  joke,  though  not  by  its  present  owner;  and  is 
a  modern  fabrication,  perhaps  of  the  sixteenth  century,  possibly  His- 
pano-American  or  French-American  origin." 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  145 

It's  sheer,  brutal  attempt  to  assimilate  a  thing  that  may  or  may  not 
have  fallen  from  the  sky,  with  phenomena  admitted  by  the  anthro- 
pologic  system:  or  with  the  early  French  or  Spanish  explorers  of  Illi- 
nois. Though  it  is  ridiculous  in  a  positive  sense,  to  give  reasons,  it  is 
more  acceptable  to  attempt  reasons  more  nearly  real  than  opposing 
reasons.  Of  course,  in  his  favor,  we  note  that  Prof.  Leslie  qualifies 
his  notions.  But  his  disregards  are  that  there  is  nothing  either 
French  or  Spanish  about  this  coin.  A  legend  upon  it  is  said  to  be 
"somewhere  between  Arabic  and  Phoenician,  without  being  either." 
Prof.  Winchell  (Sparks  from  a  Geologist's  Hammer,  p.  170)  says 
of  the  crude  designs  upon  this  coin,  which  was  in  his  possession — 
scrawls  of  an  animal  and  of  a  warrior,  or  of  a  cat  and  a  gold  fish, 
whichever  be  convenient — that  they  had  been  neither  stamped  nor 
engraved,  but  "looked  as  if  etched  with  an  acid."  That  is  a  method 
unknown  in  numismatics  of  this  earth.  As  to  the  crudity  of  design 
upon  this  coin,  and  something  else — that,  though  the  "warrior" 
may  be,  by  due  disregards,  either  a  cat  or  a  gold  fish,  we  have  to 
note  that  his  head  dress  is  typical  of  the  American  Indian — could 
be  explained,  of  course,  but  for  fear  that  we  might  be  instantly 
translated  to  the  Positive  Absolute,  which  may  not  be  absolutely 
desirable,  we  prefer  to  have  some  flaws  or  negativeness  in  our  own 
expressions. 

Data  of  more  than  the  thrice-accursed: 

Tablets  of  stone,  with  the  ten  commandments  engraved  upon 
them,  in  Hebrew,  said  to  have  been  found  in  mounds  in  the  United 
States; 

Masonic  emblems  said  to  have  been  found  in  mounds  in  the 
United  States. 

We're  upon  the  borderline  of  our  acceptances,  and  we're  amorphous 
in  the  uncertainties  and  mergings  of  our  outline.  Conventionally,  or, 
with  no  real  reason  for  so  doing,  we  exclude  these  things,  and  then, 
as  grossly  and  arbitrarily  and  irrationally — though  our  attempt  is 
always  to  approximate  away  from  these  negative  states — as  ever  a 
Kepler,  Newton,  or  Darwin,  made  his  selections,  without  which  he 
could  not  have  seemed  to  be,  at  all,  because  every  one  of  them  is 
now  seen  to  be  an  illusion,  we  accept  that  other  lettered  things  have 
been  found  in  mounds  in  the  United  States.  Of  course  we  do  what 
we  can  to  make  the  selection  seem  not  gross  and  arbitrary  and  irra- 
tional. Then,  if  we  accept  that  inscribed  things  of  ancient  origin 
have  been  found  in  the  United  States;  that  can  not  be  attributed  to 
any  race  indigenous  to  the  western  hemisphere;  that  are  not  in  any 


I46  EtOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

language  ever  heard  of  in  the  eastern  hemisphere — there's  nothing  to 
it  but  to  turn  non-Euclidian  and  try  to  conceive  of  a  third  "hemi- 
sphere," or  to  accept  that  there  has  been  intercourse  between  the 
western  hemisphere  and  some  other  world. 

But  there  is  a  peculiarity  to  these  inscribed  objects.  They  re- 
mind me  of  the  records  left,  by  Sir  John  Franklin,  in  the  Arctic; 
but,  also,  of  attempts  made  by  relief  expeditions  to  communicate 
with  the  Franklin  expedition.  The  lost  explorers  cached  their  rec- 
ords— or  concealed  them  conspicuously  in  mounds.  The  relief  ex- 
peditions sent  up  balloons,  from  which  messages  were  dropped  broad- 
cast. Our  data  are  of  things  that  have  been  cached,  and  of  things 
that  seem  to  have  been  dropped 

Or  a  Lost  Expedition  from — Somewhere. 

Explorers  from  somewhere,  and  their  inability  to  return — then, 
a  long,  sentimental,  persistent  attempt,  in  the  spirit  of  our  own 
Arctic  relief-expeditions — at  least  to  establish  communication 

What  if  it  may  have  succeeded? 

We  think  of  India — the  millions  of  natives  who  are  ruled  by  a 
small  band  of  esoterics — only  because  they  receive  support  and  di- 
rection from — somewhere  else — or  from  England. 

In  1838,  Mr.  A.  B.  Tomlinson,  owner  of  the  great  mound  at 
Grave  Creek,  West  Virginia,  excavated  the  mound.  He  said  that, 
in  the  presence  of  witnesses,  he  had  found  a  small,  flat,  oval  stone 
—or  disk — upon  which  were  engraved  alphabetic  characters. 

Col.  Whittelsey,  an  expert  in  these  matters,  says  that  the  stone 
is  now  "universally  regarded  by  archaeologists  as  a  fraud":  that,  in 
his  opinion,  Mr.  Tomlinson  had  been  imposed  upon. 

Avebury,  Prehistoric  Times,  p.  271: 

"I  mention  it  because  it  has  been  the  subject  of  much  discussion, 
but  it  is  now  generally  admitted  to  be  a  fraud.  It  is  inscribed 
with  Hebrew  characters,  but  the  forger  has  copied  the  modern  in- 
stead of  the  ancient  form  of  the  letters." 

As  I  have  said,  we're  as  irritable  here,  under  the  oppressions  of 
the  anthropologists  as  ever  were  slaves  in  the  south  toward  su- 
periorities from  "poor  white  trash."  When  we  finally  reverse  our 
relative  positions  we  shall  give  lowest  place  to  the  anthropologists. 
A  Dr.  Gray  does  at  least  look  at  a  fish  before  he  conceives  of  a 
miraculous  origin  for  it.  We  shall  have  to  submerge  Lord  Avebury 
far  below  him — if  we  accept  that  the  stone  from  Grave  Creek  is  gen- 
erally regarded  as  a  fraud  by  eminent  authorities  who  did  not  know 
it  from  some  other  object — or,  in  general,  that  so  decided  an  opin- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  147 

ion  must  be  the  product  of  either  deliberate  disregard  or  ignorance 
or  fatigue.  The  stone  belongs  to  a  class  of  phenomena  that  is  re- 
pulsive to  the  System.  It  will  not  assimilate  with  the  System.  Let 
such  an  object  be  heard  of  by  such  a  systematist  as  Avebury,  and 
the  mere  mention  of  it  is  as  nearly  certainly  the  stimulus  to  a  con- 
ventional reaction  as  is  a  charged  body  to  an  electroscope  or  a  glass 
of  beer  to  a  prohibitionist.  It  is  of  the  ideals  of  Science  to  know 
one  object  from  another  before  expressing  an  opinion  upon  a  thing, 
but  that  is  not  the  spirit  of  universal  mechanics: 

A  thing.  It  is  attractive  or  repulsive.  Its  conventional  reaction 
follows. 

Because  it  is  not  the  stone  from  Grave  Creek  that  is  in  Hebrew 
characters,  either  ancient  or  modern:  it  is  a  stone  from  Newark, 
Ohio,  of  which  the  story  is  told  that  a  forger  made  this  mistake 
of  using  modern  instead  of  ancient  Hebrew  characters.  We  shall 
see  that  the  inscription  upon  the  Grave  Creek  stone  is  not  in  He- 
brew. 

Or  all  things  are  presumed  to  be  innocent,  but  are  supposed  to  be 
guilty — unless  they  assimilate. 

Col.  Whittelsey  (Western  Reserve  Historical  Tracts,  No.  33) 
says  that  the  Grave  Creek  stone  was  considered  a  fraud  by  Wilson, 
Squires,  and  Davis.  Then  he  comes  to  the  Congress  of  Archaeolo- 
gists at  Nancy,  France,  1875.  It  is  hard  for  Col.  Whittelsey  to 
admit  that,  at  this  meeting,  which  sounds  important,  the  stone  was 
endorsed.  He  reminds  us  of  Mr.  Symons,  and  "the  man"  who 
"considered"  that  he  saw  something.  Co).  Whittelsey's  somewhat 
tortuous  expression  is  that  the  finder  of  the  stone  "so  imposed  his 
views"  upon  the  congress  that  it  pronounced  the  stone  genuine. 

Also  the  stone  was  examined  by  Schoolcraft.  He  gave  his  opinion 
for  genuineness. 

Or  there's  only  one  process,  and  "see-saw"  is  one  of  its  aspects. 
Three  or  four  fat  experts  on  the  side  against  us.  We  find  four  or 
five  plump  ones  on  our  side.  Or  all  that  we  call  logic  and  reason- 
ing ends  up  as  sheer  preponderance  of  avoirdupois. 

Then  several  philologists  came  out  in  favor  of  genuineness.  Some 
of  them  translated  the  inscription.  Of  course,  as  we  have  said,  it  is 
our  method — or  the  method  of  orthodoxy — way  in  which  all  conclu- 
sions are  reached — to  have  some  awfully  eminent,  or  preponderantly 
plump,  authorities  with  us  whenever  we  can — in  this  case,  however, 
we  feel  just  a  little  apprehensive  in  being  caught  in  such  excellently 
obese,  but  somewhat  negativized  company: 


I48  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Translation  by  M.  Jombard: 

"Thy  orders  are  laws:  thou  shinest  in  impetuous  elan  and  rapid 
chamois." 

M.  Maurice  Schwab: 

"The  chief  of  Emigration  who  reached  these  places  (or  this 
island)  has  fixed  these  characters  forever." 

M.  Oppert: 

"The  grave  of  one  who  was  assassinated  here.  May  God,  to  re- 
venge him,  strike  his  murderer,  cutting  off  the  hand  of  his 
existence." 

I  like  the  first  one  best.  I  have  such  a  vivid  impression  from 
it  of  some  one  polishing  up  brass  or  something,  and  in  an  awful 
hurry.  Of  course  the  third  is  more  dramatic — still  they're  all  very 
good.  They  are  perturbations  of  one  another,  I  suppose. 

In  Tract  44,  Col.  Whittelsey  returns  to  the  subject.  He  gives 
the  conclusion  of  Major  De  Helward,  at  the  Congress  of  Luxem- 
bourg, 1877: 

"If  Prof.  Read  and  myself  are  right  in  the  conclusion  that  the 
figures  are  neither  of  the  Runic,  Phoenician,  Canaanite,  Hebrew, 
Lybian,  Celtic,  or  any  other  alphabet-language,  its  importance  has 
been  greatly  over-rated." 

Obvious  to  a  child;  obvious  to  any  mentality  not  helplessly  sub- 
jected to  a  system: 

That  just  therein  lies  the  importance  of  this  object. 

It  is  said  that  an  ideal  of  science  is  to  find  out  the  new — but,  un- 
less a  thing  be  of  the  old,  it  is  "unimportant." 

"It  is  not  worth  while."   (Hovey.) 

Then  the  inscribed  ax,  or  wedge,  which,  according  to  Dr.  John 
C.  Evans,  in  a  communication  to  the  American  Ethnological  So- 
ciety, was  plowed  up,  near  Pemberton,  N.  J.,  1859.  The  char- 
acters upon  this  ax,  or  wedge,  are  strikingly  similar  to  the  charac- 
ters on  the  Grave  Creek  stone.  Also,  with  a  little  disregard  here 
and  a  little  more  there,  they  look  like  tracks  in  the  snow  by  some 
one's  who's  been  out  celebrating,  or  like  your  handwriting,  or  mine, 
when  we  think  there's  a  certain  distinction  in  illegibility.  Method 
of  disregard:  anything's  anything. 

Dr.  Abbott  describes  this  object  in  the  Report  of  the  Smithsonian 
Institution,  1875-260. 

He  says  he  has  no  faith  in  it. 

All  progress  is  from  the  outrageous  to  the  commonplace.  Or 
quasi-existence  proceeds  from  rape  to  the  crooning  of  lullabies. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  149 

It's  been  interesting  to  me  to  go  over  various  long-established 
periodicals,  and  note  controversies  between  attempting  positivists, 
and  then  intermediatistic  issues.  Bold,  bad  intruders  of  theories; 
ruffians  with  dishonorable  intentions — the  alarms  of  Science;  her 
attempts  to  preserve  that  which  is  dearer  than  life  itself — submis- 
sion— then  a  fidelity  like  Mrs.  Micawber's.  So  many  of  these  ruf- 
fians, or  wandering  comedians  that  were  hated,  or  scorned,  pitied, 
embraced,  conventionalized.  There's  not  a  notion  in  this  book  that 
has  a  more  frightful,  or  ridiculous,  mien  than  had  the  notion  of 
human  footprints  in  rocks,  when  that  now  respectabilized  ruffian, 
or  clown,  was  first  heard  from.  It  seems  bewildering  to  one  whose 
interests  are  not  scientific  that  such  rows  should  be  raised  over 
such  trifles:  but  the  feeling  of  a  systematist  toward  such  an  intruder 
is  just  about  what  any  one's  would  be  if  a  tramp  from  the  street 
should  come  in,  sit  at  one's  dinner  table,  and  say  he  belonged  there. 
We  know  what  hypnosis  can  do:  let  him  insist  with  all  his  might 
that  he  does  belong  there,  and  one  begins  to  suspect  that  he  may  be 
right;  that  he  may  have  higher  perceptions  of  what's  right.  The 
prohibitionists  had  this  worked  out  very  skillfully. 

So  the  row  that  was  raised  over  the  stone  from  Grave  Creek — 
but  time  and  cumulativeness,  and  the  very  factor  we  make  so  much 
of — or  the  power  of  massed  data.  There  were  other  reports  of  in- 
scribed stones,  and  then,  half  a  century  later,  some  mounds — or 
caches,  as  we  call  them — were  opened  by  the  Rev.  Mr.  Gass,  near 
the  city  of  Davenport.  (American  Antiquarian,  15-73.)  Several 
stone  tablets  were  found.  Upon  one  of  them,  the  letters 
"TFTOWNS"  may  easily  be  made  out.  In  this  instance  we  hear 
nothing  of  fradulency — time,  cumulativeness,  the  power  of  massed 
data.  The  attempt  to  assimilate  this  datum  is: 

That  the  tablet  was  probably  of  Mormon  origin. 

Why? 

Because,  at  Mendon,  HI.,  was  found  a  brass  plate,  upon  which 
were  similar  characters. 

Why  that? 

Because  that  was  found  "near  a  house  once  occupied  by  a  Mor- 
mon." 

In  a  real  existence,  a  real  meteorologist,  suspecting  that  cinders 
had  come  from  a  fire  engine — would  have  asked  a  fireman. 

Tablets  of  Davenport — there's  not  a  record  findable  that  it  ever 
occurred  to  any  antiquarian — to  ask  a  Mormon. 

Other  tablets  were  found.    Upon  one  of  them  are  two  "F's"  and 


150  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

two  "8's."  Also  a  large  tablet,  twelve  inches  by  eight  to  ten  inches 
"with  Roman  numerals  and  Arabic."  It  is  said  that  the  figure  "8" 
occurs  three  times,  and  the  figure,  or  letter  "O"  seven  times.  "With 
these  familiar  characters  are  others  that  resemble  ancient  alpha- 
bets, either  Phoenecian  or  Hebrew." 

It  may  be  that  the  discovery  of  Australia,  for  instance,  will  turn 
out  to  be  less  important  than  the  discovery  and  the  meaning  of 
these  tablets 

But  where  will  you  read  of  them  in  anything  subsequently  pub- 
lished; what  antiquarian  has  ever  since  tried  to  understand  them, 
and  their  presence,  and  indications  of  antiquity,  in  a  land  that 
we're  told  was  inhabited  only  by  unlettered  savages? 

These  things  that  are  exhumed  only  to  be  buried  in  some  other 
way. 

Another  tablet  was  found,  at  Davenport,  by  Mr.  Charles  Har- 
rison, president  of  the  American  Antiquarian  Society.  "...  8  and 
other  hieroglyphics  are  upon  this  tablet."  This  time,  also,  fraud 
is  not  mentioned.  My  own  notion  is  that  it  is  very  unsportsman- 
like ever  to  mention  fraud.  Accept  anything.  Then  explain  it  your 
way.  Anything  that  assimilates  with  one  explanation,  must  have 
assimilable  relations,  to  some  degree,  with  all  other  explanations, 
if  all  explanations  are  somewhere  continuous.  Mormons  are  lugged 
in  again,  but  the  attempt  is  faint  and  helpless — "because  general 
circumstances  make  it  difficult  to  explain  the  presence  of  these 
tablets." 

Altogether  our  phantom  resistance  is  mere  attribution  to  the 
Mormons,  without  the  slightest  attempt  to  find  base  for  the  attribu- 
tion. We  think  of  messages  that  were  showered  upon  this  earth,  and 
of  messages  that  were  cached  in  mounds  upon  this  earth.  The  simi- 
larity to  the  Franklin  situation  is  striking.  Conceivably  centuries 
from  now,  objects  dropped  from  relief-expedition-balloons  may  be 
found  in  the  Arctic,  and  conceivably  there  are  still  undiscovered 
caches  left  by  Franklin,  in  the  hope  that  relief  expeditions  would 
find  them.  It  would  be  as  incongruous  to  attribute  these  things  to 
the  Eskimos  as  to  attribute  tablets  and  lettered  stones  to  the 
aborigines  of  America.  Some  time  I  shall  take  up  an  expression  that 
the  queer-shaped  mounds  upon  this  earth  were  built  by  explorers 
from  Somewhere,  unable  to  get  back,  designed  to  attract  attention 
from  some  other  world,  and  that  a  vast  sword-shaped  mound  has 

been  discovered  upon  the  moon Just  now  we  think  of  lettered 

things  and  their  two  possible  significances. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  151 

A  bizarre  little  lost  soul,  rescued  from  one  of  the  morgues  of  the 
American  Journal  of  Science: 

An  account,  sent  by  a  correspondent,  to  Prof.  Silliman,  of  some- 
thing that  was  found  in  a  block  of  marble,  taken  Nov.,  1829,  from 
a  quarry,  near  Philadelphia  (Am.  J.  Sci.,  1-19-361).  The  block 
was  cut  into  slabs.  By  this  process,  it  is  said,  was  exposed  an  in- 
dentation in  the  stone,  about  one  and  a  half  inches  by  five-eighths 
of  an  inch.  A  geometric  indentation:  in  it  were  two  definite-looking 
raised  letters,  like  "I  U":  only  difference  is  that  the  corners  of  the 
"U"  are  not  rounded,  but  are  right  angles.  We  are  told  that  this 
block  of  stone  came  from  a  depth  of  seventy  or  eighty  feet — or  that, 
if  acceptable,  this  lettering  was  done  long,  long  ago.  To  some 
persons,  not  sated  with  the  commonness  of  the  incredible  that  has 
to  be  accepted,  it  may  seem  grotesque  to  think  that  an  indentation 
in  sand  could  have  tons  of  other  sand  piled  upon  it  and  hardening 
into  stone,  without  being  pressed  out — but  the  famous  Nicaraguan 
footprints  were  found  in  a  quarry  under  eleven  strata  of  solid  rock. 
There  was  no  discussion  of  this  datum.  We  only  take  it  out  for  an 
airing, 

As  to  lettered  stones  that  may  once  upon  a  time  have  been  showered 
upon  Europe,  if  we  cannot  accept  that  the  stones  were  inscribed  by 
indigenous  inhabitants  of  Europe,  many  have  been  found  in  caves 
— whence  they  were  carried  as  curiosities  by  prehistoric  men,  or  as 
ornaments,  I  suppose.  About  the  size  and  shape  of  the  Grave 
Creek  stone,  or  disk:  "flat  and  oval  and  about  two  inches  wide." 
(Sollas.)  Characters  painted  upon  them:  found  first  by  M.  Piette, 
in  the  cave  of  Mas  d'  Azil,  Ariege.  According  to  Sollas,  they  are 
marked  in  various  directions  with  red  and  black  lines.  "But  on  not 
a  few  of  them,  more  complex  characters  occur,  which  in  a  few  in- 
stances simulate  some  of  the  capital  letters  of  the  Roman  alphabet." 
In  one  instance  the  letters  "F  El"  accompanied  by  no  other  mark- 
ings to  modify  them,  are  as  plain  as  they  could  be.  According  to 
Sollas  ("Ancient  Hunters,"  p.  95)  M.  Cartailhac  has  confirmed  the 
observations  of  Piette,  and  M.  Boule  has  found  additional  examples. 
"They  offer  one  of  the  darkest  problems  of  prehistoric  times." 
(Sollas.) 

As  to  caches  in  general,  I  should  say  that  they  are  made  with  two 
purposes:  to  proclaim  and  to  conceal;  or  that  caches  documents 
are  hidden,  or  covered  over,  in  conspicuous  structures;  at  least,  so 
are  designed  the  cairns  in  the  Arctic. 

Trans  N.  Y.  Acad.  of  Sciences,  11-27: 


i52  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

That  Mr.  J.  H.  Hooper,  Bradley  Co.,  Term.,  having  come  upon  a 
curious  stone,  in  some  woods  upon  his  farm,  investigated.  He  dug. 
He  unearthed  a  long  wall.  Upon  this  wall  were  inscribed  many  al- 
phabetic characters.  "872  characters  have  been  examined,  many 
of  them  duplicates,  and  a  few  imitations  of  animal  forms,  the  moon, 
and  other  objects.  Accidental  imitations  of  oriental  alphabets  are 
numerous. 

The  part  that  seems  significant: 

That  these  letters  had  been  hidden  under  a  layer  of  cement. 

And  still,  in  our  own  heterogeneity,  or  unwillingness,  or  inability, 
to  concentrate  upon  single  concepts,  we  shall — or  we  sha'n't — accept 
that,  though  there  may  have  been  a  Lost  Colony  or  Lost  Expedi- 
tion from  Somewhere,  upon  this  earth,  and  extra-mundane  visitors 
Who  could  never  get  back,  there  have  been  other  extra-mundane 
visitors,  who  have  gone  away  again — altogether  quite  in  analogy  with 
the  Franklin  Expedition  and  Peary's  Sittings  in  the  Arctic 

And  a  wreck  that  occurred  to  one  group  of  them 

And  the  loot  that  was  lost  overboard 

The  Chinese  seals  of  Ireland. 

Not  the  things  with  the  big,  wistful  eyes;  that  lie  on  ice,  and  that 
are  taught  to  balance  objects  on  their  noses — but  inscribed  stamps, 
with  which  to  make  impressions. 

Proc.  Roy.  Irish  Acad.y  1-381: 

A  paper  was  read  by  Mr.  J.  Huband  Smith,  descriptive  of  about  a 
dozen  Chinese  seals  that  had  been  found  in  Ireland.  They  are  all 
alike:  each  a  cube  with  an  animal  seated  upon  it.  "It  is  said  that 
the  inscriptions  upon  them  are  of  a  very  ancient  class  of  Chinese 
characters." 

The  three  points  that  have  made  a  leper  and  an  outcast  of  this 
datum — but  only  in  the  sense  of  disregard,  because  nowhere  that  I 
know  of  is  it  questioned : 

Agreement  among  archaeologists  that  there  were  no  relations,  in 
the  remote  past,  between  China  and  Ireland; 

That  no  other  objects,  from  ancient  China — virtually,  I  suppose 
— have  ever  been  found  in  Ireland; 

The  great  distances  at  which  these  seals  have  been  found  apart. 

After  Mr.  Smith's  investigations — if  he  did  investigate,  or  do  more 
than  record — many  more  Chinese  seals  were  found  in  Ireland,  and, 
with  one  exception,  only  in  Ireland.  In  1852,  about  60  had  been 
found.  Of  all  archaeologic  finds  in  Ireland,  "none  is  enveloped  in 
greater  mystery."  (Chamber's  Journal,  16-364.)  According  to  the 


BOOK  OF  JHE  DAMNED  153 

writer  in  Chamber's  Journal,  one  of  these  seals  was  found  in  a  cu- 
riosity shop  in  London.  When  questioned,  the  shopkeeper  said  that 
it  had  come  from  Ireland. 

In  this  instance,  if  you  don't  take  instinctively  to  our  expression, 
there  is  no  orthodox  explanation  for  your  preference.  It  is  the 
astonishing  scattering  of  them,  over  field  and  forest,  that  has 
hushed  the  explainers.  In  the  Proceedings  of  the  Royal  Irish 
Academy,  10-171,  Dr.  Frazer  says  that  they  "appear  to  have  been 
sown  broadcast  over  the  country  in  some  strange  way  that  I  cannot 
offer  solution  of." 

The  struggle  for  expression  of  a  notion  that  did  not  belong  to  Dr. 
Frazer 's  era: 

"The  invariable  story  of  their  find  is  what  we  might  expect  if 
they  had  been  accidentally  dropped.  .  .  ." 

Three  were  found  in  Tipperary;  six  in  Cork;  three  in  Down; 
four  in  Waterford;  all  the  rest — one  or  two  to  a  county. 

But  one  of  these  Chinese  seals  was  found  in  the  bed  of  the  River 
Boyne,  near  Clonard,  Meath,  when  workmen  were  raising  gravel. 

That  one,  at  least,  had  been  dropped  there. 


CHAPTER  XII 

A  STRONOMY. 

jt\  And  a  watchman  looking  at  half  a  dozen  lanterns,  where 
a  street's  been  torn  up. 

There  are  gas  lights  and  kerosene  lamps  and  electric  lights  in  the 
neighborhood:  matches  flaring,  fires  in  stoves,  bonfires,  house  afire 
somewhere;  lights  of  automobiles,  illuminated  signs 

The  watchman  and  his  one  little  system. 

Ethics. 

And  some  young  ladies  and  the  dear  old  professor  of  a  verjf 
"select"  seminary. 

Drugs  and  divorce  and  rape:  venereal  diseases,  drunkenness, 
murder 

Excluded. 

The  prim  and  the  precise,  or  the  exact,  the  homogeneous,  the 
single,  the  puritanic,  the  mathematic,  the  pure,  the  perfect.  We  can 
have  illusion  of  this  state — but  only  by  disregarding  its  infinite 
denials.  It's  a  drop  of  milk  afloat  in  acid  that's  eating  it.  The  po- 
sitive swamped  by  the  negative.  So  it  is  in  intermediateness,  where 
only  to  "be"  positive  is  to  generate  corresponding  and,  perhaps, 
equal  negativeness.  In  our  acceptance,  it  is,  in  quasi-existence,  pre- 
monitory, or  pre-natal,  or  pre-awakening  consciousness  of  a  real 
existence. 

But  this  consciousness  of  realness  is  the  greatest  resistance  to 
efforts  to  realize  or  to  become  real — because  it  is  feeling  that  realness 
has  been  attained.  Our  antagonism  is  not  to  Science,  but  to  the 
attitude  of  the  sciences  that  they  have  finally  realized;  or  to  be- 
lief, instead  of  acceptance;  to  the  insufficiency,  which,  as  we  have 
seen  over  and  over,  amounts  to  paltriness  and  puerility,  of  scientific 
dogmas  and  standards.  Or,  if  several  persons  start  out  to  Chicago, 
and  get  to  Buffalo,  and  one  be  under  the  delusion  that  Buffalo  is 
Chicago,  that  one  will  be  a  resistance  to  the  progress  of  the  others. 

So  astronomy  and  its  seemingly  exact,  little  system 

But  data  we  shall  have  of  round  worlds  and  spindle-shaped  worlds, 
and  worlds  shaped  like  a  wheel;  worlds  like  titanic  pruning  hooks; 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  155 

world  linked  together  by  streaming  filaments;  solitary  worlds,  and 
worlds  in  hordes:  tremendous  worlds  and  tiny  worlds:  some  of  them 
made  of  material  like  the  material  of  this  earth;  and  worlds  that 
are  geometric  super-constructions  made  of  iron  and  steel 

Or  not  only  fall  from  the  sky  of  ashes  and  cinders  and  coke  and 
charcoal  and  oily  substances  that  suggest  fuel — but  the  masses  of 
iron  that  have  fallen  upon  this  earth. 

Wrecks  and  flotsam  and  fragments  of  vast  iron  constructions • 

Or  steel.  Sooner  or  later  we  shall  have  to  take  up  an  expres- 
sion that  fragments  of  steel  have  fallen  from  the  sky.  If  frag- 
ments, not  of  iron,  but  of  steel,  have  fallen  upon  this  earth 

But  what  would  a  deep-sea  fish  learn  even  if  a  steel  plate  of  a 
wrecked  vessel  above  him  should  drop  and  bump  him  on  the  nose? 

Our  submergence  in  a  sea  of  conventionality  of  almost  impene- 
trable density. 

Sometimes  I'm  a  savage  who  has  found  something  on  the  beach 
of  his  island.  Sometimes  I'm  a  deep-sea  fish  with  a  sore  nose. 

The  greatest  of  mysteries: 

Why  don't  they  ever  come  here,  or  send  here,  openly? 

Of  course  there's  nothing  to  that  mystery  if  we  don't  take  so 
seriously  the  notion — that  we  must  be  interesting.  It's  probably 
for  moral  reasons  that  they  stay  away — but  even  so,  there  must 
be  some  degraded  ones  among  them. 

Or  physical  reasons: 

When  we  can  specially  take  up  that  subject,  one  of  our  leading 
ideas,  or  credulities,  will  be  that  near  approach  by  another  world  to 
this  world  would  be  catastrophic:  that  navigable  worlds  would 
avoid  proximity;  that  others  that  have  survived  have  organized  into 
protective  remotenesses,  or  orbits  which  approximate  to  regularity, 
though  by  no  means  to  the  degree  of  popular  supposition. 

But  the  persistence  of  the  notion  that  we  must  be  interesting. 
Bugs  and  germs  and  things  like  that:  they're  interesting  to  us: 
some  of  them  are  too  interesting. 

Dangers  of  near  approach — nevertheless  our  own  ships  that  dare 
not  venture  close  to  a  rocky  shore  can  send  rowboats  ashore 

Why  not  diplomatic  relations  established  between  the  United 
States  and  Cyclorea — which,  in  our  advanced  astronomy,  is  the 
name  of  a  remarkable  wheel-shaped  world  or  super-construction? 
Why  not  missionaries  sent  here  openly  to  convert  us  from  our  bar- 
barous prohibitions  and  other  taboos,  and  to  prepare  the  way  for  a 
good  trade  in  ultra-bibles  and  sup*  r- whiskeys;  fortunes  made  in 


IS6  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

selling  us  cast-off  super-fineries,  which  we'd  take  to  like  an  African 
chief  to  some  one's  old  silk  hat  from  New  York  or  London? 

The  answer  that  occurs  to  me  is  so  simple  that  it  seems  imme- 
diately acceptable,  if  we  accept  that  the  obvious  is  the  solution  of 
all  problems,  or  if  most  of  our  perplexities  consist  in  laboriously  and 
painfully  conceiving  of  the  unanswerable,  and  then  looking  for 
answers — using  such  words  as  "obvious"  and  "solution"  conven- 
tionally  

Or: 

Would  we,  if  we  could,  educate  and  sophisticate  pigs,  geese, 
cattle? 

Would  it  be  wise  to  establish  diplomatic  relation  with  the  hen 
that  now  functions,  satisfied  with  mere  sense  of  achievement  by  way 
of  compensation? 

I  think  we're  property. 

I  should  say  we  belong  to  something: 

That  once  upon  a  time,  this  earth  was  No-man's  Land,  that  other 
worlds  explored  and  colonized  here,  and  fought  among  themselves 
for  possession,  but  that  now  it's  owned  by  something: 

That  something  owns  this  earth — all  others  warned  off. 

Nothing  in  our  own  times — perhaps — because  I  am  thinking  of 
certain  notes  I  have — has  ever  appeared  upon  this  earth,  from  some- 
where else,  so  openly  as  Columbus  landed  upon  San  Salvador,  or  as 
Hudson  sailed  up  his  river.  But  as  to  surreptitious  visits  to  this 
earth,  in  recent  times,  or  as  to  emissaries,  perhaps,  from  other 
worlds,  or  voyagers  who  have  shown  every  indication  of  intent  to 
evade  and  avoid,  we  shall  have  data  as  convincing  as  our  data  of 
oil  or  coal-burning  aerial  super-constructions. 

But,  in  this  vast  subject,  I  shall  have  to  do  considerable  neglecting 
or  disregarding,  myself.  I  don't  see  how  I  can,  in  this  book,  take 
up  at  all  the  subject  of  possible  use  of  humanity  to  some  other  mode 
of  existence,  or  the  flattering  notion  that  we  can  possibly  be  worth 
something. 

Pigs,  geese,  and  cattle. 
First  find  out  that  they  are  owned. 
Then  find  out  the  whyness  of  it. 

I  suspect  that,  after  all,  we're  useful — that  among  contesting 
claimants,  adjustment  has  occurred,  or  that  something  now  has  a 
legal  right  to  us,  by  force,  or  by  having  paid  out  analogues  of  beads 
for  us  to  former,  more  primitive,  owners  of  us — all  others  warned 
off — that  all  this  has  been  known,  perhaps  for  ages,  to  certain  ones 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  157 

upon  this  earth,  a  cult  or  order,  members  of  which  function  like 
bellwethers  to  the  rest  of  us,  or  as  superior  slaves  or  overseers,  direct- 
ing us  in  accordance  with  instructions  received — from  Somewhere 
else — hi  our  mysterious  usefulness. 

But  I  accept  that,  in  the  past,  before  proprietorship  was  estab- 
lished, inhabitants  of  a  host  of  other  worlds  have — dropped  here, 
hopped  here,  wafted,  sailed,  flown,  motored — walked  here,  for  all 
I  know — been  pulled  here,  been  pushed;  have  come  singly,  have 
come  in  enormous  numbers;  have  visited  occasionally,  have  visited 
periodically  for  hunting,  trading,  replenishing  harems,  mining:  have 
been  unable  to  stay  here,  have  established  colonies  here,  have  been 
lost  here;  far-advanced  peoples,  or  things,  and  primitive  peoples  or 
whatever  they  were:  white  ones,  black  ones,  yellow  ones 

I  have  a  very  convincing  datum  that  the  ancient  Britons  were 
blue  ones. 

Of  course  we  are  told  by  conventional  anthropologists  that  they 
only  painted  themselves  blue,  but  in  our  own  advanced  anthropology, 
they  were  veritable  blue  ones 

Annals  of  Philosophy,  14-51: 

Note  of  a  blue  child  born  in  England. 

That's  atavism. 

Giants  and  fairies.  We  accept  them,  of  course.  Or,  if  we  pride 
ourselves  upon  being  awfully  far-advanced,  I  don't  know  how  to 
sustain  our  conceit  except  by  very  largely  going  far  back.  Science 
of  to-day — the  superstition  of  to-morrow.  Science  of  to-morrow — 
the  superstition  of  to-day. 

Notice  of  a  stone  ax,  17  inches  long:  9  inches  across  broad  end. 
(Proc.  Soc.  of  Ants,  of  Scotland,  1-9-184.) 

Amer.  Antiquarian,  18-60: 

Copper  ax  from  an  Ohio  mound:  22  inches  long;  weight  38 
pounds. 

Amer.  Anthropologist,  n.  s.,  8-229: 

Stone  ax  found  at  Birchwood,  Wisconsin — exhibited  in  the  col- 
lection of  the  Missouri  Historical  Society — found  with  "the  pointed 
end  embedded  hi  the  soil" — for  all  I  know,  may  have  dropped  there 
— 28  inches  long,  14  wide,  n  thick — weight  300  pounds. 

Or  the  footprints,  in  sandstone,  near  Carson,  Nevada — each  print 
1 8  to  20  inches  long.  (Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  3-26-139.) 

These  footprints  are  very  clear  and  well-dfined:  reproduction  of 
them  in  the  Journal — but  they  assimilate  with  the  System,  like  sour 


I58  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

apples  to  other  systems:  so  Prof.  Marsh,  a  loyal  and  unscrupulous 
systematist,  argues: 

"The  size  of  these  footprints  and  specially  the  width  between  the 
right  and  left  series,  are  strong  evidence  that  they  were  not  made  by 
men,  as  has  been  so  generally  supposed." 

So  these  excluders.  Stranglers  of  Minerva.  Desperadoes  of  dis- 
regard. Above  all,  or  below  all,  the  anthropologists.  I'm  inspired 
with  a  new  insult — some  one  offends  me:  I  wish  to  express  almost 
absolute  contempt  for  him — he's  a  systematistic  anthropologist. 
Simply  to  read  something  of  this  kind  is  not  so  impressive  as  to  see 
for  one's  self:  if  any  one  will  take  the  trouble  to  look  up  these  foot- 
prints, as  pictured  in  the  Journal,  he  will  either  agree  with  Prof. 
Marsh  or  feel  that  to  deny  them  is  to  indicate  a  mind  as  profoundly 
enslaved  by  a  system  as  was  ever  the  humble  intellect  of  a  medieval 
monk.  The  reasoning  of  this  representative  phantom  of  the  chosen, 
or  of  the  spectral  appearances  who  sit  in  judgment,  or  condemnation, 
upon  us  of  the  more  nearly  real: 

That  there  never  were  giants  upon  this  earth,  because  gigantic 
footprints  are  more  gigantic  than  prints  made  by  men  who  are  not 
giants. 

We  think  of  giants  as  occasional  visitors  to  this  earth.  Of  course 
— Stonehenge,  for  instance.  It  may  be  that,  as  time  goes  on,  we 
shall  have  to  admit  that  there  are  remains  of  many  tremendous  hab- 
itation of  giants  upon  this  earth,  and  that  their  appearances  here 
were  more  than  casual — but  their  bones — or  the  absence  of  their 

Except — that,  no  matter  how  cheerful  and  unsuspicious  my  dis- 
position may  be,  when  I  go  to  the  American  Museum  of  Natural 
History,  dark  cynicisms  arise  the  moment  I  come  to  the  fossils — or 
old  bones  that  have  been  found  upon  this  earth — gigantic  things — 
that  have  been  reconstructed  into  terrifying  but  "proper"  dinosaurs 
— but  my  uncheerfulness 

The  dodo  did  it. 

On  one  of  the  floors  below  the  fossils,  they  have  a  reconstructed 
dodo.  It's  frankly  a  fiction:  it's  labeled  as  such — but  it's  been 
reconstructed  so  cleverly  and  so  convincingly 

Fairies. 

"Fairy  crosses." 

Harper's  Weekly,  50-715: 

That,  near  the  point  where  the  Blue  Ridge  and  the  Allegheny 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  159 

Mountains  unite,  north  of  Patrick  County,  Virginia,  many  little 
stone  crosses  have  been  found. 

A  race  of  tiny  beings. 

They  crucified  cockroaches. 

Exquisite  beings — but  the  cruelty  of  the  exquisite.  In  their 
diminutive  way  they  were  human  beings.  They  crucified. 

The  "fairy  crosses,"  we  are  told  in  Harper's  Weekly,  range  in 
weight  from  one-quarter  of  an  ounce  to  an  ounce:  but  it  is  said,  in 
the  Scientific  American,  79-395,  that  some  of  them  are  no  larger 
than  the  head  of  a  pin. 

They  have  been  found  in  two  other  states,  but  all  in  Virginia  are 
strictly  localized  on  and  along  Bull  Mountain. 

We  are  reminded  of  the  Chinese  seals  in  Ireland. 

I  suppose  they  fell  there. 

Some  are  Roman  crosses,  some  St.  Andrew's,  some  Maltese.  This 
time  we  are  spared  contact  with  the  anthropologists  and  have  geolo- 
gists instead,  but  I  am  afraid  that  the  relief  to  our  finer,  or  more 
nearly  real,  sensibilities  will  not  be  very  great.  The  geologists  were 
called  upon  to  explain  the  "fairy  crosses."  Their  response  was  the 
usual  scientific  tropism — "Geologists  say  that  they  are  crystals." 
The  writer  in  Harper's  Weekly  points  out  that  this  "hold  up,"  or 
this  anaesthetic,  if  theoretic  science  be  little  but  attempt  to  assuage 
pangs  of  the  unexplained,  fails  to  account  for  the  localized  distribu- 
tions of  these  objects — which  make  me  think  of  both  aggregation 
and  separation  at  the  bottom  of  the  sea,  if  from  a  wrecked  ship, 
similar  objects  should  fall  in  large  numbers  but  at  different  times. 

But  some  are  Roman  crosses,  some  St.  Andrew's,  some  Maltese. 

Conceivably  there  might  be  a  mineral  that  would  have  a  diversity 
of  geometric  forms,  at  the  same  time  restricted  to  some  expression  of 
the  cross,  because  snowflakes,  for  instance,  have  diversity  but  re- 
striction to  the  hexagon,  but  the  guilty  geologists,  cold-blooded  as 
astronomers  and  chemists  and  all  the  other  deep-sea  fishes — though 
less  profoundly  of  the  pseudo-saved  than  the  wretched  anthropolo- 
gists— disregarded  the  very  datum — that  it  was  wise  to  disregard : 

That  the  "fairy  crosses"  are  not  all  made  of  the  same  material. 

It's  the  same  old  disregard,  or  it's  the  same  old  psycho-tropism, 
or  process  of  assimilation.  Crystals  are  geometric  forms.  Crystals 
are  included  in  the  System.  So  then  "fairy  crosses"  are  crystals. 
But  that  different  minerals  should,  in  a  few  different  regions,  be 
inspired  to  turn  into  different  forms  of  the  cross — is  the  kind  of 
resistance  that  we  call  less  nearly  real  than  our  own  acceptances. 


160  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

We  now  come  to  some  "cursed"  little  things  that  are  of  the  "lost," 
but  for  the  "salvation"  of  which  scientific  missionaries  have  done 
their  dam-dest. 

"Pigmy  flints." 

They  can't  very  well  be  denied. 

They're  lost  and  well  known. 

"Pigmy  flints"  are  tiny,  prehistoric  implements.  Some  of  them 
are  a  quarter  of  an  inch  in  size.  England,  India,  France,  South 
Africa — they've  been  found  in  many  parts  of  the  world — whether 
showered  there  or  not.  They  belong  high  up  in  the  froth  of  the 
accursed:  they  are  not  denied,  and  they  have  not  been  disregarded ; 
there  is  an  abundant  literature  upon  this  subject.  One  attempt  to 
rationalize  them,  or  assimilate  them,  or  take  them  into  the  scientific 
fold,  has  been  the  notion  that  they  were  toys  of  prehistoric  children. 
It  sounds  reasonable.  But,  of  course,  by  the  reasonable  we  mean 
that  for  which  the  equally  reasonable,  but  opposing,  has  not  been 
found  out — except  that  we  modify  that  by  saying  that,  though 
nothing's  finally  reasonable,  some  phenomena  have  higher  approxi- 
mations to  Reasonableness  than  have  others.  Against  the  notion  of 
toys,  the  higher  approximation  is  that  where  "pigmy  flints"  are 
found,  all  flints  are  pigmies — at  least  so  in  India,  where,  when  larger 
implements  have  been  found  in  the  same  place,  there  are  separations 
by  strata.  (Wilson.) 

The  datum  that,  just  at  present,  leads  me  to  accept  that  these 
flints  were  made  by  beings  about  the  size  of  pickles,  is  a  point 
brought  out  by  Prof.  Wilson  (Kept.  National  Museum,  1892-455): 

Not  only  that  the  flints  are  tiny  but  that  the  chipping  upon  them 
is  "minute."  * 

Struggle  for  expression,  in  the  mind  of  a  iQth-century-ite,  of  an 
idea  that  did  not  belong  to  his  era: 

In  Science  Gossip,  1896-36,  R.  A.  Galty  says: 

"So  fine  is  the  chipping  that  to  see  the  workmanship  a  magnify- 
ing glass  is  necessary. 

I  think  that  would  be  absolutely  convincing,  if  there  were  any- 
thing— absolutely  anything — either  that  tiny  beings,  from  pickle  to 
cucumber-stature  made  these  things,  or  that  ordinary  savages  made 
them  under  magnifying  glasses. 

The  idea  that  we  are  now  going  to  develop,  or  perpetrate,  is  rather 
intensely  of  the  accursed,  or  the  advanced.  It's  a  lost  soul,  I  admit 
boast — but  it  fits  in.  Or,  as  conventional  as  ever,  our  own 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  161 

method  is  the  scientific  method  of  assimilating.  It  assimilates,  if  we 
think  of  the  inhabitants  of  Elvera 

By  the  way,  I  forgot  to  tell  the  name  of  the  giant 's  world: 

Monstrator. 

Spindle-shaped  world — about  100,000  miles  along  its  major  axis — 
more  details  to  be  published  later. 

But  our  coming  inspiration  fits  in,  if  we  think  of  the  inhabitants 
of  Elvera  as  having  only  visited  here:  having,  in  hordes  as  dense  as 
clouds  of  bats,  come  here,  upon  hunting  excursions — for  mice,  I 
should  say:  for  bees,  very  likely — or  most  likely  of  all,  or  inevitably, 
to  convert  the  heathen  here — horrified  with  any  one  who  would 
gorge  himself  with  more  than  a  bean  at  a  time;  fearful  for  the  souls 
of  beings  who  would  guzzle  more  than  a  dew  drop  at  a  time — hordes 
of  tiny  missionaries,  determined  that  right  should  prevail,  determin- 
ing right  by  their  own  minutenesses. 

They  must  have  been  missionaries. 

Only  to  be  is  motion  to  convert  or  assimilate  something  else. 

The  idea  now  is  that  tiny  creatures  coming  here  from  their  own 
little  world,  which  may  be  Eros,  though  I  call  it  Elvera,  would  flit 
from  the  exquisite  to  the  enormous — gulp  of  a  fair-sized  terrestrial 
animal — half  a  dozen  of  them  gone  and  soon  digested.  One  falls 
into  a  brook — torn  away  in  a  mighty  torrent 

Or  never  anything  but  conventional,  we  adopt  from  Darwin: 

"The  geological  records  are  incomplete." 

Their  flints  would  survive,  but,  as  to  their  fragile  bodies — one 
might  as  well  search  for  prehistoric  frost-traceries.  A  little  whirl- 
wind— Elverean  carried  away  a  hundred  yards — body  never  found 
by  his  companions.  They'd  mourn  for  the  departed.  Conventional 
emotion  to  have:  they'd  mourn.  There'd  have  to  be  a  funeral: 
there's  no  getting  away  from  funerals.  So  I  adopt  an  explanation 
that  I  take  from  the  anthropologists:  burial  in  effigy.  Perhaps  the 
Elvereans  would  not  come  to  this  earth  again  until  many  years  later 
— another  distressing  occurrence — one  little  mausoleum  for  all 
burials  in  effigy. 

.London  Times,  July  20,  1836: 

That,  early  in  July,  1836,  some  boys  were  searching  for  rabbits' 
burrows  in  the  rocky  formation,  near  Edinburgh,  known  as  Arthur's 
Seat.  In  the  side  of  a  cliff,  they  came  upon  some  thin  sheets  of 
slate,  which  they  pulled  out. 

Little  cave. 

Seventeen  tiny  coffins. 


162  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Three  or  four  inches  long. 

In  the  coffins  were  miniature  wooden  figures.  They  were  dressed 
differently  both  in  style  and  material.  There  were  two  tiers  of 
eight  coffins  each,  and  a  third  tier  begun,  with  one  coffin. 

The  extraordinary  datum,  which  has  especially  made  mystery 
here: 

That  the  coffins  had  been  deposited  singly,  in  the  little  cave,  and 
at  intervals  of  many  years.  In  the  first  tier,  the  coffins  were  quite 
decayed,  and  the  wrappings  had  moldered  away.  In  the  second  tier, 
the  effects  of  age  had  not  advanced  so  far.  And  the  top  coffin  was 
quite  recent-looking. 

In  the  Proceedings  of  the  Society  of  Antiquarians  of  Scotland, 
3-12-460,  there  is  a  full  account  of  this  find.  Three  of  the  coffins 
and  three  of  the  figures  are  pictured. 

So  Elvera  with  its  downy  forests  and  its  microscopic  oyster  shells 
— and  if  the  Elvereans  be  not  very  far-advanced,  they  take  baths — 
with  sponges  the  size  of  pin  heads 

Or  that  catastrophes  have  occurred:  that  fragments  of  Elvera  have 
fallen  to  this  earth: 

In  Popular  Science,  20-83,  Francis  Bingham,  writing  of  the  corals 
and  sponges  and  shells  and  crinoids  that  Dr.  Hahn  had  asserted  that 
he  had  found  in  meteorites,  says,  judging  by  the  photographs  of 
them,  that  their  "notable  peculiarity"  is  their  "extreme  smallness." 
The  corals,  for  instance,  are  about  one-twentieth  the  size  of  terres- 
trial corals.  "They  represent  a  veritable  pigmy  animal  world,"  says 
Bingham. 

The  inhabitants  of  Monstrator  and  Elvera  were  primitives,  I  think, 
at  the  time  of  their  occasional  visits  to  this  earth — though,  of  course, 
in  a  quasi-existence,  anything  that  we  semi-phantoms  call  evidence 
of  anything  may  be  just  as  good  evidence  of  anything  else.  Logi- 
cians and  detectives  and  jurymen  and  suspicious  wives  and  members 
of  the  Royal  Astronomic  Society  recognize  this  indeterminateness, 
but  have  the  delusion  that  in  the  method  of  agreement  there  is  final, 
or  real  evidence.  The  method  is  good  enough  for  an  "existence" 
that  is  only  semi-real,  but  also  it  is  the  method  of  reasoning  by  which 
witches  were  burned,  and  by  which  ghosts  have  been  feared.  I'd 
not  like  to  be  so  unadvanced  as  to  deny  witches  and  ghosts,  but  I 
do  think  that  there  never  have  been  witches  and  ghosts  like  those 
of  popular  supposition.  But  stories  of  them  have  been  supported 
by  astonishing  fabrications  of  details  and  of  different  accounts  in 
agreement. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  163 

So,  if  a  giant  left  impressions  of  his  bare  feet  in  the  ground,  that 
is  not  to  say  that  he  was  a  primitive — bulk  of  culture  out  taking  the 
Kneipp  cure.  So,  if  Stonehenge  is  a  large,  but  only  roughly 
geometric  construction,  the  inattention  to  details  by  its  builders — • 
signifies  anything  you  please — ambitious  dwarfs  or  giants — if  giants, 
that  they  were  little  more  than  cave  men,  or  that  they  were  post- 
impressionist  architects  from  a  very  far-advanced  civilization. 

If  there  are  other  worlds,  there  are  tutelary  worlds — or  that  Kep- 
ler, for  instance,  could  not  have  been  absolutely  wrong:  that  his 
notion  of  an  angel  assigned  to  push  along  and  guide  each  planet 
may  not  be  very  acceptable,  but  that,  abstractedly,  or  in  the  notion 
of  a  tutelary  relation,  we  may  find  acceptance. 

Only  to  be  is  to  be  tutelary. 

Our  general  expression: 

That  "everything*'  in  Intermediateness  is  not  a  thing,  but  is  an 
endeavor  to  become  something — by  breaking  away  from  its  con- 
tinuity, or  merging  away,  with  all  other  phenomena — is  an  attempt 
to  break  away  from  the  very  essence  of  a  relative  existence  and 
become  absolute — if  it  have  not  surrendered  to,  or  become  part  of, 
some  higher  attempt: 

That  to  this  process  there  are  two  aspects: 

Attraction,  or  the  spirit  of  everything  to  assimilate  all  other 
things — if  it  have  not  given  in  and  subordinated  to — or  have  not 
been  assimilated  by — some  higher  attempted  system,  unity,  organ- 
ization, entity,  harmony,  equilibrium— 

And  repulsion,  or  the  attempt  of  everything  to  exclude  or  dis- 
regard the  unassimilable. 

Universality  of  the  process: 

Anything  conceivable: 

A  tree.  It  is  doing  all  it  can  to  assimilate  substances  of  the  soil 
and  substances  of  the  air,  and  sunshine,  too,  into  tree-substance: 
obversely  it  is  rejecting  or  excluding  or  disregarding  that  which  it 
can  not  assimilate. 

Cow  grazing,  pig  rooting,  tiger  stalking:  planets  trying,  or  acting, 
to  capture  comets;  rag  pickers  and  the  Christian  religion,  and  a  cat 
dow.i  headfirst  in  a  garbage  can;  nations  fighting  for  more  territory, 
sciences  correlating  the  data  they  can,  trust  magnates  organizing, 
chorus  girl  out  for  a  little  late  supper — all  of  them  stopped  some- 
where by  the  unassimilable.  Chorus  girl  and  the  broiled  lobster. 
If  she  eats  not  shell  and  all  she  represents  universal  failure  to  posi- 


164  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

tivize.    Also,  if  she  does  she  represents  universal  failure  to  positivize: 
her  ensuing  disorders  will  translate  her  to  the  Negative  Absolute. 

Or  Science  and  some  of  our  cursed  hard-shelled  data. 

One  speaks  of  the  tutelarian  as  if  it  were  something  distinct  in 
itself.  So  one  speaks  of  a  tree,  a  saint,  a  barrel  of  pork,  the  Rocky 
Mountains.  One  speaks  of  missionaries,  as  if  they  were  positively 
different,  or  had  identity  of  their  own,  or  were  a  species  by  them- 
selves. To  the  Intermediatist,  everything  that  seems  to  have  iden- 
tity is  only  attempted  identity,  and  every  species  is  continuous  with 
all  other  species,  or  that  which  is  called  the  specific  is  only  emphasis 
upon  some  aspect  of  the  general.  If  there  are  cats,  they're  only 
emphasis  upon  universal  felinity.  There  is  nothing  that  does  not 
partake  of  that  of  which  the  missionary,  or  the  tutelary,  is  the 
special.  Every  conversation  is  a  conflict  of  missionaries,  each  try- 
ing to  convert  the  other,  to  assimilate,  or  to  make  the  other  similar 
to  himself.  If  no  progress  be  made,  mutual  repulsion  will  follow. 

If  other  worlds  have  ever  in  the  past  had  relations  with  this  earth, 
they  were  attempted  positivizations:  to  extend  themselves,  by  col- 
onies, upon  this  earth;  to  convert,  or  assimilate,  indigenous  inhabi- 
tants of  this  earth. 

Or  parent-worlds  and  their  colonies  here 

Super-Romanimus 

Or  where  the  first  Romans  came  from. 

It's  as  good  as  the  Romulus  and  Remus  story. 

Super-Israelimus 

Or  that,  despite  modern  reasoning  upon  this  subject,  there  was 
once  something  that  was  super-parental  or  tutelary  to  early  orientals. 

Azuria,  which  was  tutelary  to  the  early  Britons: 

Azuria,  whence  came  the  blue  Britons,  whose  descendants  grad- 
ually diluting,  like  blueing  in  a  wash-tub,  where  a  faucet's  turned 
on,  have  been  most  emphasized  of  sub-tutelarians,  or  assimilators 
ever  since. 

Worlds  that  were  once  tutelarian  worlds — before  this  earth  be- 
came sole  property  of  one  of  them — their  attempts  to  convert  or 
assimilate — but  then  the  state  that  comes  to  all  things  in  their 
missionary-frustrations — unacceptance  by  all  stomachs  of  some 
things;  rejection  by  all  societies  of  some  units;  glaciers  that  sort 
over  and  cast  out  stones 

Repulsion.  Wrath  of  the  baffled  missionary.  There  is  no  other 
wrath.  All  repulsion  is  reaction  to  the  unassimilable. 

So  then  the  wrath  of  Azuria ? 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  165 

Because  surrounding  peoples  of  this  earth  would  not  assimilate 
with  her  own  colonists  in  the  part  of  the  earth  that  we  now  call 
England. 

I  don't  know  that  there  has  ever  been  more  nearly  just,  reason- 
able, or  logical  wrath,  in  this  earth's  history — if  there  is  no  other 
wrath. 

The  wrath  of  Azuria,  because  the  other  peoples  of  this  earth  would 
not  turn  blue  to  suit  her. 

History  is  a  department  of  human  delusion  that  interests  us.  We 
are  able  to  give  a  little  advancement  to  history.  In  the  vitrified 
forts  of  a  few  parts  of  Europe,  we  find  data  that  the  Humes  and 
Gibbons  have  disregarded. 

The  vitrified  forts  surrounding  England,  but  not  in  England. 

The  vitrified  forts  of  Scotland,  Ireland,  Brittany,  and  Bohemia. 

Or  that,  once  upon  a  time,  with  electric  blasts,  Azuria  tried  to 
swipe  this  earth  clear  of  the  peoples  who  resisted  her. 

The  vast  blue  bulk  of  Azuria  appeared  in  the  sky.  Clouds  turned 
green.  The  sun  was  formless  and  purple  in  the  vibrations  of  wrath 
that  were  emanating  from  Azuria.  The  whitish,  or  yellowish,  or 
brownish  peoples  of  Scotland,  Ireland,  Brittany,  and  Bohemia  fled 
to  hill  tops  and  built  forts.  In  a  real  existence,  hill  tops,  or  easiest 
accessibility  to  an  aerial  enemy,  would  be  the  last  choice  in  refuges. 
But  here,  in  quasi-existence,  if  we're  accustomed  to  run  to  hill  tops, 
in  times  of  danger,  we  run  to  them  just  the  same,  even  with  danger 
closest  to  hill  tops.  Very  common  in  .quasi-existence:  attempt  to 
escape  by  running  closer  to  the  pursuing. 

They  built  forts,  or  already  had  forts,  on  hill  tops. 

Something  poured  electricity  upon  them. 

The  stones  of  these  forts  exist  to  this  day,  vitrified,  cr  melted  and 
turned  to  glass. 

The  archaeologists  have  jumped  from  one  conclusion  to  another, 
like  the  "rapid  chamois"  we  read  of  a  while  ago,  to  account  for 
vitrified  forts,  always  restricted  by  the  commandment  that  unless 
their  conclusions  conformed  to  such  tenets  as  Exclusionism,  of  the 
System,  they  would  be  excommunicated.  So  archaeologists,  in  their 
medieval  dread  of  excommunication,  have  tried  to  explain  vitrified 
forts  in  terms  of  terrestrial  experience.  We  find  in  their  insufficien- 
cies the  same  old  assimilating  of  all  that  could  be  assimilated,  and 
disregard  for  the  unassimilable,  conventionalizing  into  the  explana- 
tion that  vitrified  forts  were  made  by  prehistoric  peoples  who  built 
vast  fires — often  remote  from  wood-supply — to  melt  externally,  and 


i66  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

to  cement  together,  the  stones  of  their  constructions.  But  negative- 
ness  always:  so  within  itself  a  science  can  never  be  homogeneous  or 
unified  or  harmonious.  So  Miss  Russel,  in  the  Journal  of  the  B. 
A.  A.y  has  pointed  out  that  it  is  seldom  that  single  stones,  to  say 
nothing  of  long  walls,  of  large  houses  that  are  burned  to  the  ground, 
are  vitrified. 

If  we  pay  a  little  attention  to  this  subject,  ourselves,  before  start- 
ing to  write  upon  it,  which  is  one  of  the  ways  of  being  more  nearly 
real  than  oppositions  so  far  encountered  by  us,  we  find: 

That  the  stones  of  these  forts  are  vitrified  in  no  reference  to 
cementing  them:  that  they  are  cemented  here  and  there,  in  streaks, 
as  if  special  blasts  had  struck,  or  played,  upon  them. 

Then  one  thinks  of  lightning? 

Once  upon  a  time  something  melted,  in  streaks,  the  stones  of  forts 
on  the  tops  of  hills  in  Scotland,  Ireland,  Brittany,  and  Bohemia. 

Lightning  selects  the  isolated  and  conspicuous. 

But  some  of  the  vitrified  forts  are  not  upon  tops  of  hills:  some 
are  very  inconspicuous:  their  walls  too  are  vitrified  in  streaks. 

Something  once  had  effect,  similar  to  lightning,  upon  forts,  mostly 
on  hills,  in  Scotland,  Ireland,  Brittany,  and  Bohemia. 

But  upon  hills,  all  over  the  rest  of  the  world,  are  remains  of  forts 
that  are  not  vitrified. 

There  is  only  one  crime,  in  the  local  sense,  and  that  is  not  to  turn 
blue,  if  the  gods  are  blue:  but,  in  the  universal  sense,  the  one  crime 
is  not  to  turn  the  gods  themselves  green,  if  you're  green. 


CHAPTER  Xin 

ONE  of  the  most  extraordinary  of  phenomena,  or  alleged  phe- 
nomena, of  psychic  research,  or  alleged  research — if  in  quasi- 
existence  there  never  has  been  real  research,  but  only  approxima- 
tions to  research  that  merge  away,  or  that  are  continuous  with, 
prejudice  and  convenience 

"Stone- throwing." 

It's  attributed  to  poltergeists.    They're  mischievous  spirits. 

Poltergeis\s  do  not  assimilate  with  our  own  present  quasi-system, 
which  is  an  attempt  to  correlate  denied  or  disregarded  data  as  phe- 
nomena of  extra-telluric  forces,  expressed  in  physical  terms.  There- 
fore I  regard  poltergeists  as  evil  or  false  or  discordant  or  absurd — 
names  that  we  give  to  various  degrees  or  aspects  of  the  unassimil- 
able,  or  that  which  resists  attempts  to  organize,  harmonize,  system- 
atize, or,  in  short,  to  positivize — names  that  we  give  to  our  recogni- 
tions of  the  negative  state.  I  don't  care  to  deny  poltergeists,  be- 
cause I  suspect  that  later,  when  we're  more  enlightened,  or  when 
we  widen  the  range  of  our  credulities,  or  take  on  more  of  that 
increase  of  ignorance  that  is  called  knowledge,  poltergeists  may 
become  assimilable.  Then  they'll  be  as  reasonable  as  trees.  By 
reasonableness  I  mean  that  which  assimilates  with  a  dominant  force, 
or  system,  or  a  major  body  of  thought — which  is,  itself,  of  course, 
hypnosis  and  delusion — developing,  however,  in  our  acceptance,  to 
higher  and  higher  approximations  to  realness.  The  poltergeists  are 
now  evil  or  absurd  to  me,  proportionately  to  their  present  unassimil- 
ableness,  compounded,  however,  with  the  factor  of  their  possible 
future  assimilableness. 

We  lug  in  the  poltergeists,  because  some  of  our  own  data,  or 
alleged  data,  merge  away  indistinguishably  with  data,  or  alleged 
data,  of  them: 

Instances  of  stones  that  have  been  thrown,  or  that  have  fallen, 
upon  a  small  area,  from  an  unseen  and  undetectable  source. 

London  Times,  April  27,  1872: 

"From  4  o'clock,  Thursday  afternoon,  until  half  past  eleven, 
Thursday  night,  the  houses,  56  and  58  Reverdy  Road,  Bermondsey, 

167 


168  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

were  assailed  with  stones  and  other  missiles  coming  from  an  unseen 
quarter.  Two  children  were  injured,  every  window  broken,  and 
several  articles  of  furniture  were  destroyed.  Although  there  was  a 
strong  body  of  policemen  scattered  in  the  neighborhood,  they  could 
not  trace  the  direction  whence  the  stones  were  thrown." 

"Other  missiles"  make  a  complication  here.  But  if  the  expression 
means  tin  cans  and  old  shoes,  and  if  we  accept  that  the  direction 
could  not  be  traced  because  it  never  occurred  to  any  one  to  look 
upward — why  we've  lost  a  good  deal  of  our  provincialism  by  this 
time. 

London  Times,  Sept.  16,  1841: 

That,  in  the  home  of  Mrs.  Charton,  at  Sutton  Courthouse,  Sutton 
Lane,  Chiswick,  windows  had  been  broken  "by  some  unseen  agent." 
Every  attempt  to  detect  the  perpetrator  failed.  The  mansion  was 
detached  and  surrounded  by  high  walls.  No  other  building  was 
near  it. 

The  police  were  called.  Two  constables,  assisted  by  members  of 
the  household,  guarded  the  house,  but  the  windows  continued  to  be 
broken  "both  in  front  and  behind  the  house." 

Or  the  floating  islands  that  are  often  stationary  in  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea;  and  atmospheric  disturbances  that  sometimes  affect 
them,  and  bring  things  down  within  small  areas,  upon  this  earth, 
from  temporarily  stationary  sources. 

Super-Sargasso  Sea  and  the  beaches  of  its  floating  islands  from 
which  I  think,  or  at  least  accept,  pebbles  have  fallen: 

Wolverhampton,  England,  June,  1860 — violent  storm — fall  of 
so  many  little  black  pebbles  that  they  were  cleared  away  by  shovel- 
ing (La  Set.  Pour  Tons,  5-264);  great  number  of  small  black  stones 
that  fell  at  Birmingham,  England,  Aug.,  1858 — violent  storm — said 
to  be  similar  to  some  basalt  a  few  leagues  from  Birmingham  (Rept. 
Brit.  Assoc.,  1864-37);  pebbles  described  as  "common  water-worn 
pebbles"  that  fell  at  Palestine,  Texas,  July  6,  1888— "of  a  forma- 
tion not  found  near  Palestine"  (W.  H.  Perry,  Sergeant,  Signal 
Corps),  Monthly  Weather  Review,  July,  1888);  round,  smooth 
pebbles  at  Kandahor,  1834  (Am.  J.  Sci.,  1-26-161);  "a  number  of 
stones  of  peculiar  formation  and  shapes,  unknown  in  this  neighbor- 
hood, fell  in  a  tornado  at  Hillsboro,  111.,  May  18,  1883."  (Monthly 
Weather  Review,  May,  1883.) 

Pebbles  from  aerial  beaches  and  terrestrial  pebbles  as  products  of 
whirlwinds,  so  merge  in  these  instances  that,  though  it's  interesting 
to  hear  of  things  of  peculiar  shape  that  have  fallen  from  the  sky, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  169 

it  seems  best  to  pay  little  attention  here,  and  to  find  phenomena  of 
the  Super-Sargasso  Sea  remote  from  the  merger: 

To  this  requirement  we  have  three  adaptations: 

Pebbles  that  fell  where  no  whirlwind  to  which  to  attribute  them 
could  be  learned  of; 

Pebbles  which  fell  in  hail  so  large  that  incredibly  could  that  hail 
have  been  formed  in  this  earth's  atmosphere; 

Pebbles  which  fell  and  were,  long  afterward,  followed  by  more 
pebbles,  as  if  from  some  aerial,  stationary  source,  in  the  same  place. 

In  September,  1898,  there  was  a  story  in  a  New  York  newspaper, 
of  lightning — or  an  appearance  of  luminosity? — in  Jamaica — some- 
thing had  struck  a  tree:  near  the  tree  were  found  some  small  pebbles. 
It  was  said  that  the  pebbles  had  fallen  from  the  sky,  with  the 
lightning.  But  the  insult  to  orthodoxy  was  that  they  were  not 
angular  fragments  such  as  might  have  been  broken  from  a  stony 
meteorite:  that  they  were  "water- worn  pebbles." 

In  the  geographical  vagueness  of  a  mainland,  the  explanation  "up 
from  one  place  and  down  in  another"  is  always  good,  and  is  never 
overworked,  until  the  instances  are  massed  as  they  are  in  this  book: 
but,  upon  this  occasion,  in  the  relatively  small  area  of  Jamaica, 
there  was  no  whirlwind  findable — however  "there  in  the  first  place'7 
bobs  up. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  Aug.,  1898-363: 

That  the  government  meteorologist  had  investigated:  had  reported 
that  a  tree  had  been  struck  by  lightning,  and  that  small  water-worn 
pebbles  had  been  found  near  the  tree:  but  that  similar  pebbles  could 
be  found  all  over  Jamaica. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  Sept.,  1915-446: 

Prof.  Fassig  gives  an  account  of  a  fall  of  hail  that  occurred  in 
Maryland,  June  22,  1915:  hailstones  the  size  of  baseballs  "not  at 
all  uncommon." 

"An  interesting,  but  unconfirmed,  account  stated  that  small 
pebbles  were  found  at  the  center  of  some  of  the  larger  hail  gathered 
at  Annapolis.  The  young  man  who  related  the  story  offered  to 
produce  the  pebbles,  but  has  not  done  so." 

A  footnote: 

"Since  writing  this,  the  author  states  that  he  has  received  some 
of  the  pebbles." 

When  a  young  man  "produces"  pebbles,  that's  as  convincing  as 
anything  else  I've  ever  heard  of,  though  no  more  convincing  than, 
if  having  told  of  ham  sandwiches  falling  from  the  sky,  he  should 


iyo  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

"produce"  ham  sandwiches.  If  this  "reluctance"  be  admitted  by 
us,  we  correlate  it  with  a  datum  reported  by  a  Weather  Bureau 
observer,  signifying  that,  whether  the  pebbles  had  been  somewhere 
aloft  a  long  time  or  not,  some  of  the  hailstones  that  fell  with  them, 
had  been.  The  datum  is  that  some  of  these  hailstones  were  com- 
posed of  from  twenty  to  twenty-five  layers  alternately  of  clear  ice 
and  snow-ice.  In  orthodox  terms  I  argue  that  a  fair-sized  hailstone 
falls  from  the  clouds  with  velocity  sufficient  to  warm  it  so  that  it 
would  not  take  on  even  one  layer  of  ice.  To  put  on  twenty  layers 
of  ice,  I  conceive  of  something  that  had  not  fallen  at  all,  but  had 
rolled  somewhere,  at  a  leisurely  rate,  for  a  long  time. 

We  now  have  a  commonplace  datum  that  is  familiar  in  two 
respects: 

Little,  symmetric  objects  of  metal  that  fell  at  Orenburg,  Russia, 
Sept.,  1824  (PhU.  Mag.,  4-8-463). 

A  second  fall  of  these  objects,  at  Orenburg,  Russia,  Jan.  25,  1825 
(Qi4ar.  Jour.  Roy.  Inst.,  1828-1-447). 

I  now  think  of  the  disk  of  Tarbes,  but  when  first  I  came  upon 
these  data  I  was  impressed  only  with  recurrence,  because  the  objects 
of  Orenburg  were  described  as  crystals  of  pyrites,  or  sulphate  of 
iron.  I  had  no  notion  of  metallic  objects  that  might  have  been 
shaped  or  molded  by  means  other  than  crystallization,  until  I  came 
to  Arago's  account  of  these  occurrences  (CEuvres,  11-644).  Here 
the  analysis  gives  70  per  cent,  red  oxide  of  iron,  and  sulphur  and 
loss  by  ignition  5  per  cent.  It  seems  to  me  acceptable  that  iron  with 
considerably  less  than  5  per  cent,  sulphur  in  it  is  not  iron  pyrites — 
then  little,  rusty  iron  objects,  shaped  by  some  other  means,  have 
fallen,  four  months  apart,  at  the  same  place.  M.  Arago  expresses 
astonishment  at  this  phenomenon  of  recurrence  so  familiar  to  us. 

Altogether,  I  find  opening  before  us,  vistas  of  heresies  to  which  I, 
for  one,  must  shut  my  eyes.  I  have  always  been  in  sympathy  with 
the  dogmatists  and  exclusionists:  that  is  plain  in  our  opening  lines: 
that  to  seem  to  be  is  falsely  and  arbitrarily  and  dogmatically  to 
exclude.  It  is  only  that  exclusionists  who  are  good  in  the  nineteenth 
century  are  evil  in  the  twentieth  century.  Constantly  we  feel  a 
merging  away  into  infinitude;  but  that  this  book  shall  approximate 
to  form,  or  that  our  data  shall  approximate  to  organization,  or  that 
we  shall  approximate  to  intelligibility,  we  have  to  call  ourselves 
back  constantly  from  wandering  off  into  infinitude.  The  thing  that 
we  do,  however,  is  to  make  our  own  outline,  or  the  difference  be- 
tween what  we  include  and  what  we  exclude,  vague. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  171 

The  crux  here,  and  the  limit  beyond  which  we  may  not  go — very 
much — is: 

Acceptance  that  there  is  a  region  that  we  call  the  Super-Sargasso 
Sea — not  yet  fully  accepted,  but  a  provisional  position  that  has 
received  a  great  deal  of  support 

But  is  it  a  part  of  this  earth,  and  does  it  revolve  with  and  over 
this  earth 

Or  does  it  flatly  overlie  this  earth,  not  revolving  with  and  over 
this  earth 

That  this  earth  does  not  revolve,  and  is  not  round,  or  roundish, 
at  all,  but  is  continuous  with  the  rest  of  its  system,  so  that,  if  one 
could  break  away  from  the  traditions  of  the  geographers,  one  might 
walk  and  walk,  and  come  to  Mars,  and  then  find  Mars  continuous 
with  Jupiter? 

I  suppose  some  day  such  queries  will  sound  absurd — the  thing 
will  be  so  obvious 

Because  it  is  very  difficult  to  me  to  conceive  of  little  metallic  ob- 
jects hanging  precisely  over  a  small  town  in  Russia,  for  four 
months,  if  revolving,  unattached,  with  a  revolving  earth 

It  may  be  that  something  aimed  at  that  town,  and  then  later  took 
another  shot. 

These  are  speculations  that  seem  to  me  to  be  evil  relatively  to 
these  early  years  in  the  twentieth  century 

Just  now,  I  accept  that  this  earth  is — not  round,  of  course:  that 
is  very  old-fashioned — but  roundish,  or,  at  least,  that  it  has  what  is 
called  form  of  its  own,  and  does  revolve  upon  its  axis,  and  in  an 
orbit  around  the  sun.  I  only  accept  these  old  traditional  notions 

And  that  above  it  are  regions  of  suspension  that  revolve  with  it: 
from  which  objects  fall,  by  disturbances  of  various  kinds,  and  then, 
later,  fall  again,  in  the  same  place: 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  May,  1884-134: 

Report  from  the  Signal  Service  observer,  at  Bismarck,  Dakota: 

That,  at  9  o'clock,  in  the  evening  of  May  22,  1884,  sharp  sounds 
were  heard  throughout  the  city,  caused  by  a  fall  of  flinty  stones 
striking  against  windows. 

Fifteen  hours  later  another  fall  of  flinty  stones  occurred  at  Bis- 
marck. 

There  is  no  report  of  stones  having  fallen  anywhere  else. 

This  is  a  thing  of  the  ultra-damned.  All  Editors  of  scientific  pub- 
lications read  the  Monthly  Weather  Review  and  frequently  copy 
from  it.  The  noise  made  by  the  stones  of  Bismarck,  rattling  against 


1 72  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

those  windows,  may  be  in  a  language  that  aviators  will  some  day 
interpret:  but  it  was  a  noise  entirely  surrounded  by  silences.  Of 
this  ultra-damned  thing,  there  is  no  mention,  findable  by  me,  in  any 
other  publication. 

The  size  of  some  hailstones  has  worried  many  meteorologists — 
but  not  text-book  meteorologists.  I  know  of  no  more  serene  occu- 
pation than  that  of  writing  text-books — though  writing  for  the  War 
Cry,  of  the  Salvation  Army,  may  be  equally  unadventurous.  In  the 
drowsy  tranquillity  of  a  text-book,  we  easily  and  unintelligently  read 
of  dust  particles  around  which  icy  rain  forms,  hailstones,  in  their 
fall,  then  increasing  by  accretion — but  in  the  meteorological  jour- 
nals, we  read  often  of  air-spaces  nucleating  hailstones 

But  it's  the  size  of  the  things.  Dip  a  marble  in  icy  water.  Dip 
and  dip  and  dip  it.  If  you're  a  resolute  dipper,  you  will,  after  a 
while,  have  an  object  the  size  of  a  baseball — but  I  think  a  thing 
could  fall  from  the  moon  in  that  length  of  time.  Also  the  strata  of 
them.  The  Maryland  hailstones  are  unusual,  but  a  dozen  strata 
have  often  been  counted.  Ferrel  gives  an  instance  of  thirteen  strata. 
Such  considerations  led  Prof.  Schwedoff  to  argue  that  some  hail- 
stones are  not,  and  can  not,  be  generated  in  this  earth's  atmosphere 
— that  they  come  from  somewhere  else.  Now,  in  a  relative  existence, 
nothing  can  of  itself  be  either  attractive  or  repulsive:  its  effects  are 
functions  of  its  associations  or  implications.  Many  of  our  data 
have  been  taken  from  very  conservative  scientific  sources:  it  was 
not  until  their  discordant  implications,  or  irreconcilabilities  with  the 
System,  were  perceived,  that  excommunication  was  pronounced 
against  them. 

Prof.  Schwedoff's  paper  was  read  before  the  British  Association 
(Kept,  of  1882,  p.  453). 

The  implication,  and  the  repulsiveness  of  the  implication  to  the 
snug  and  tight  little  exclusionists  of  1882 — though  we  hold  out  that 
they  were  functioning  well  and  ably  relatively  to  1882 

That  there  is*  water — oceans  or  lakes  and  ponds,  or  rivers  of  it — 
that  there  is  water  away  from,  and  yet  not  far-remote  from,  this 
earth's  atmosphere  and  gravitation 

The  pain  of  it: 

That  the  snug  little  system  of  1882  would  be  ousted  from  its 
reposefulness 

A  whole  new  science  to  learn: 

The  Science  of  Super-Geography 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  173 

And  Science  is  a  turtle  that  says  that  its  own  shell  encloses  all 
things. 

So  the  members  of  the  British  Association.  To  some  of  them 
Prof.  Schwedoff's  ideas  were  like  slaps  on  the  back  of  an  environ- 
ment-denying turtle:  to  some  of  them  his  heresy  was  like  an  offering 
of  meat,  raw  and  dripping,  to  milk-fed  lambs.  Some  of  them 
bleated  like  lambs,  and  some  of  them  turled  like  turtles.  We  used 
to  crucify,  but  now  we  ridicule:  or,  in  the  loss  of  vigor  of  all  prog- 
ress, the  spike  has  etherealized  into  the  laugh. 

Sir  William  Thomson  ridiculed  the  heresy,  with  the  phantomosi- 
ties  of  his  era: 

That  all  bodies,  such  as  hailstones,  if  away  from  this  earth's  at- 
mosphere, would  have  to  move  at  planetary  velocity — which  would 
be  positively  reasonable  if  the  pronouncements  of  St.  Isaac  were 
anything  but  articles  of  faith — that  a  hailstone  falling  through  this 
earth's  atmosphere,  with  planetary  velocity,  would  perform  13,000 
times  as  much  work  as  would  raise  an  equal  weight  of  water  one 
degree  centigrade,  and  therefore  never  fall  as  a  hailstone  at  all;  be 
more  than  melted — super-volatalized 

These  turls  and  these  bleats  of  pedantry — though  we  insist  that, 
relatively  to  1882,  these  turls  and  bleats  should  be  regarded  as  re- 
spectfully as  we  regard  rag  dolls  that  keep  infants  occupied  and 
noiseless — it  is  the  survival  of  rag  dolls  into  maturity  that  we  object 
to — so  these  pious  and  nai've  ones  who  believed  that  13,000  times 
something  could  have — that  is,  in  quasi-existence — an  exact  and 
calculable  resultant,  whereas  there  is — in  quasi-existence — nothing 
that  can,  except  by  delusion  and  convenience,  be  called  a  unit,  in 
the  first  place — whose  devotions  to  St.  Isaac  required  blind  belief  in 
formulas  of  falling  bodies 

Against  data  that  were  piling  up,  in  their  own  time,  of  slow-falling 
meteorites;  "milk  warm"  ones  admitted  even  by  Farrington  and 
Merrill;  at  least  one  icy  meteorite  nowhere  denied  by  the  present 
orthodoxy,  a  datum  as  accessible  to  Thomson,  in  1882,  as  it  is  now 
to  us,  because  it  was  an  occurrence  of  1860.  Beans  and  needles  and 
tacks  and  a  magnet.  Needles  and  tacks  adhere  to  and  systematize 
relatively  to  a  magnet,  but,  if  some  beans,  too,  be  caught  up,  they 
are  irreconcilables  to  this  system  and  drop  right  out  of  it.  A  mem- 
ber of  the  Salvation  Army  may  hear  over  and  over  data  that  seem 
so  memorable  to  an  evolutionist.  It  seems  remarkable  that  they  do 
not  influence  him — one  finds  that  he  can  not  remember  them.  It  is 
incredible  that  Sir  William  Thomson  had  never  heard  of  slow-falling, 


174  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

cold  meteorites.  It  is  simply  that  he  had  no  power  to  remember 
such  irreconcilabilities. 

And  then  Mr.  Symons  again.  Mr.  Symons  was  a  man  who  prob- 
ably did  more  for  the  science  of  meteorology  than  did  any  other 
man  of  his  time:  therefore  he  probably  did  more  to  hold  back  the 
science  of  meteorology  than  did  any  other  man  of  his  time.  In 
Nature,  41-135,  Mr.  Symons  says  that  Prof.  Schwedoff's  ideas  are 
"very  droll." 

I  think  that  even  more  amusing  is  our  own  acceptance  that,  not 
very  far  above  this  earth's  surface,  is  a  region  that  will  be  the 
subject  of  a  whole  new  science — super-geography — with  which  we 
shall  immortalize  ourselves  in  the  resentments  of  the  schoolboys  of 
the  future 

Pebbles  and  fragments  of  meteors  and  things  from  Mars  and 
Jupiter  and  Azuria:  wedges,  delayed  messages,  cannon  balls,  bricks, 
nails,  coal  and  coke  and  charcoal  and  offensive  old  cargoes — things 
that  coat  in  ice  in  some  regions  and  things  that  get  into  areas  so 
warm  that  they  putrefy — or  that  there  are  all  the  climates  of  geog- 
raphy in  super-geography.  I  shall  have  to  accept  that,  floating  in 
the  sky  of  this  earth,  there  often  are  fields  of  ice  as  extensive  as 
those  on  the  Arctic  Ocean — volumes  of  water  in  which  are  many 
fishes  and  frogs — tracts  of  land  covered  with  caterpillars 

Aviators  of  the  future.  They  fly  up  and  up.  Then  they  get  out 
and  walk.  The  fishing's  good:  the  bait's  right  there.  They  find 
messages  from  other  worlds — and  within  three  weeks  there's  a  big 
trade  worked  up  in  forged  messages.  Sometime  I  shall  write  a 
guide  book  to  the  Super-Sagasso  Sea,  for  aviators,  but  just  at  pres- 
ent there  wouldn't  be  much  call  for  it. 

We  now  have  more  of  our  expression  upon  hail  as  a  concomitant, 
or  more  data  of  things  that  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  with  hail. 

In  general,  the  expression  is: 

These  things  may  have  been  raised  from  some  other  part  of  the 
earth's  surface,  in  whirlwinds,  or  may  not  have  fallen,  and  may 
have  been  upon  the  ground,  in  the  first  place — but  were  the  hail- 
stones found  with  them,  raised  frcm  some  other  part  of  the  earth's 
surface,  or  were  the  hailstones  upon  the  ground,  in  the  first  place? 

As  I  said  before,  this  expression  is  meaningless  as  to  a  few  in- 
stances; it  is  reasonable  to  think  of  some  coincidence  between  the 
fall  of  hail  and  the  fall  of  other  things:  but,  inasmuch  as  there  have 
been  a  good  many  instances, — we  begin  to  suspect  that  this  is  not 
so  much  a  book  we're  writing  as  a  sanitarium  for  overworked  coinci- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  175 

dences.  If  not  conceivably  could  very  large  hailstones  and  lumps  of 
ice  form  in  this  earth's  atmosphere,  and  so  then  had  to  come  from 
external  regions,  then  other  things  in  or  accompanying  very  large 
hailstones  and  lumps  of  ice  came  from  external  regions — which  wor- 
ries us  a  little:  we  may  be  instantly  translated  to  the  Positive 
Absolute. 

Cosmos,  13-120,  quotes  a  Virginia  newspaper,  that  fishes  said  to 
have  been  catfishes,  a  foot  long,  some  of  them,  had  fallen,  in  1853, 
at  Norfolk,  Virginia,  with  hail. 

Vegetable  debris,  not  only  nuclear,  but  frozen  upon  the  surfaces 
of  large  hailstones,  at  Toulouse,  France,  July  28,  1874.  (La  Science 
Pour  Tous,  1874-270.) 

Description  of  a  storm,  at  Pontiac,  Canada,  July  n,  1864,  in 
which  it  is  said  that  it  was  not  hailstones  that  fell,  but  "pieces  of 
ice,  from  half  an  inch  to  over  two  inches  in  diameter."  (Canadian 
Naturalist,  2-1-308): 

"But  the  most  extraordinary  thing  is  that  a  respectable  farmer, 
of  undoubted  veracity,  says  he  picked  up  a  piece  of  hail,  or  ice,  in 
the  center  of  which  was  a  small  green  frog." 

Storm  at  Dubuque,  Iowa,  June  16,  1882,  in  which  fell  hailstones 
and  pieces  of  ice  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  June,  1882): 

"The  foreman  of  the  Novelty  Iron  Works,  of  this  city,  states  that 
in  two  large  hailstones  melted  by  him  were  found  small  living  frogs." 
But  the  pieces  of  ice  that  fell  upon  this  occasion  had  a  peculiarity 
that  indicates — though  by  as  bizarre  an  indication  as  any  we've  had 
yet — that  they  had  been  for  a  long  time  motionless  or  floating  some- 
where. We'll  take  that  up  soon. 

Living  Age,  52-186: 

That,  June  30,  1841,  fishes,  one  of  which  was  ten  inches  long, 
fell  at  Boston;  that,  eight  days  later,  fishes  and  ice  fell  at  Derby. 

In  Timb's  Year  Book,  1842-275,  it  is  said  that,  at  Derby,  the 
fishes  had  fallen  in  enormous  numbers;  from  half  an  inch  to  two 
inches  long,  and  some  considerably  larger.  In  the  Athenceum,  1841- 
542,  copied  from  the  Sheffield  Patriot,  it  is  said  that  one  of  the 
fishes  weighed  three  ounces.  In  several  accounts,  it  is  said  that, 
with  the  fishes,  fell  many  small  frogs  and  "pieces  of  half-melted  ice." 
We  are  told  that  the  frogs  and  the  fishes  had  been  raised  from  some 
other  part  of  the  earth's  surface,  in  a  whirlwind;  no  whirlwind  speci- 
fied; nothing  said  as  to  what  part  of  the  earth's  surface  comes  ice, 
in  the  month  of  July — interests  us  that  the  ice  is  described  as  "half- 
melted."  In  the  London  Times,  July  15,  1841,  it  is  said  that  the 


176  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

fishes  were  sticklebacks;  that  they  had  fallen  with  ice  and  small 
frogs,  many  of  which  had  survived  the  fall.  We  note  that,  at  Dum- 
ferline,  three  months  later  (Oct.  7,  1841)  fell  many  fishes,  several 
inches  in  length,  in  a  thunderstorm.  (London  Times,  Oct.  12,  1841.) 

Hailstones,  we  don't  care  so  much  about.  The  matter  of  stratifica- 
tion seems  significant,  but  we  think  more  of  the  fall  of  lumps  of  ice 
from  the  sky,  as  possible  data  of  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea: 

Lumps  of  ice,  a  foot  in  circumference,  Derbyshire,  England,  May 
12,  1811  (Annual  Register,  1811-54);  cuboidal  mass,  six  inches 
in  diameter,  that  fell  at  Birmingham,  26  days  later  (Thomson  "Intro, 
to  Meteorology,"  p.  179);  size  of  pumpkins,  Bungalore,  India,  May 
22,  1851  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1855-35);  masses  of  ice  of  a  pound 
and  a  half  each,  New  Hampshire,  Aug.  13,  1851  (Lummis,  "Meteor- 
ology," p.  129) ;  masses  of  ice,  size  of  a  man's  head,  in  the  Delphos 
tornado  (Ferrel,  "Popular  Treatise,"  p.  428) ;  large  as  a  man's  hand, 
killing  thousands  of  sheep,  Texas,  May  3,  1877  (Monthly  Weatkef 
Review,  May,  1877);  "pieces  of  ice  so  large  that  they  could  not  be 
grasped  in  one  hand,"  in  a  tornado,  in  Colorado,  June  24,  1877 
(Monthly  Weather  Review,  June,  1877);  lumps  of  ice  four  and  a 
half  inches  long,  Richmond,  England,  Aug.  2,  1879  (Symons'  Met. 
Mag.,  14-100);  mass  of  ice,  21  inches  in  circumference  that  fell 
with  hail,  Iowa,  June,  1881  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  June,  1881) ; 
"pieces  of  ice,"  eight  inches  long,  and  an  inch  and  a  half  thick, 
Davenport,  Iowa,  Aug.  30,  1882  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  Aug., 
1882);  lump  of  ice  size  of  a  brick;  weight  two  pounds,  Chicago, 
July  12,  1883  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  July,  1883);  lumps  of 
ice  that  weighed  one  pound  and  a  half  each,  India,  May  (?),  1888 
(Nature,  37-42);  lump  of  ice  weighing  four  pounds,  Texas,  Dec. 
6,  1893  (Sc.  Am.,  68-58);  lumps  of  ice  one  pound  in  weight,  Nov. 
14,  1901,  in  a  tornado,  Victoria  (Meteorology  of  Australia,  p.  34). 

Of  course  it  is  our  acceptance  that  these  masses  not  only  accom- 
panied tornadoes,  but  were  brought  down  to  this  earth  by  tornadoes. 

Flammarion,  "The  Atmosphere,"  p.  34: 

Block  of  ice,  weighing  four  and  a  half  pounds  that  fell  at  Cazorta, 
Spain,  June  15,  1829;  block  of  ice,  weighing  eleven  pounds,  at 
Cette,  France,  Oct.,  1844;  mass  of  ice  three  feet  long,  three  feet 
wide,  and  more  than  two  feet  thick,  that  fell,  in  a  storm,  in  Hun- 
gary, May  8,  1802. 

Scientific  American,  47-119: 

That,  according  to  the  Salina  Journal,  a  mass  of  ice,  weighing 
about  80  pounds  had  fallen  from  the  sky,  near  Salina,  Kansas,  Aug., 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  177 

1882.  We  are  told  that  Mr.  W.  J.  Hagler,  the  North  Santa  Fe" 
merchant  became  possessor  of  it,  and  packed  it  in  sawdust  in  his 
store. 

London  Times,  April  7,  1860: 

That,  upon  the  i6th  of  March,  1860,  in  a  snowstorm,  in  Upper 
Wasdale,  blocks  of  ice,  so  large  that  at  a  distance  they  looked  like 
a  flock  of  sheep,  had  fallen. 

Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1851-32: 

That  a  mass  of  ice  about  a  cubic  yard  in  size  had  fallen  at  Can- 
deish,  India,  1828. 

Against  these  data,  though,  so  far  as  I  know,  so  many  of  them 
have  never  been  assembled  together  before,  there  is  a  silence  upon 
the  part  of  scientific  men  that  is  unusual.  Our  Super-Sargasso  Sea 
may  not  be  an  unavoidable  conclusion,  but  arrival  upon  this  earth 
of  ice  from  external  regions  does  seem  to  be — except  that  there 
must  be,  be  it  ever  so  faint,  a  merger.  It  is  in  the  notion  that 
these  masses  of  ice  are  only  congealed  hailstones.  We  have  data 
against  this  notion,  as  applied  to  all  our  instances,  but  the  ex- 
planation has  been  offered,  and,  it  seems  to  me,  may  apply  in  some 
instances.  In  the  Bull.  Soc.  Astro,  de  France,  20-245,  it  is  said 
of  blocks  of  ice  the  size  of  decanters  that  had  fallen  at  Tunis  that 
they  were  only  masses  of  congealed  hailstones. 

London  Times,  Aug.  4,  1857: 

That  a  block  of  ice,  described  as  "pure"  ice,  weighing  25  pounds, 
had  been  found  in  the  meadow  of  Mr.  Warner,  of  Cricklewood. 
There  had  been  a  storm  the  day  before.  As  in  some  of  our  other 
instances,  no  one  had  seen  this  object  fall  from  the  sky.  It  was 
found  after  the  storm:  that's  all  that  can  be  said  about  it. 

Letter  from  Capt.  Blakiston,  communicated  by  Gen.  Sabine,  to 
the  Royal  Society  (London  Roy.  Soc.  Proc.,  10-468) : 

That,  Jan.  14,  1860,  in  a  thunderstorm,  pieces  of  ice  had  fallen 
upon  Capt.  Blakiston's  vessel — that  it  was  not  hail.  "It  was  not 
hail,  but  irregular  shaped  pieces  of  solid  ice  of  different  dimen- 
sions, up  to  the  size  of  half  a  brick." 

According  to  the  Advertiser-Scotsman,  quoted  by  the  Edinburgh 
New  Philosophical  Magazine,  47-371,  an  irregular-shaped  mass  of 
ice  fell  at  Ord,  Scotland,  Aug.,  1849,  after  "an  extraordinary  peal 
of  thunder." 

It  is  said  that  this  was  homogeneous  ice,  except  in  a  small  part, 
which  looked  like  congealed  hailstones. 

The  mass  was  about  20  feet  in  circumference. 


178  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

The  story,  as  told  in  the  London  Times,  Aug.  14,  1849,  is  that, 
upon  the  evening  of  the  i3th  of  August,  1849,  after  a  loud  peal  of 
thunder,  a  mass  of  ice  said  to  have  been  20  feet  in  circumference, 
had  fallen  upon  the  estate  of  Mr.  Moffat,  of  Balvullich,  Ross- 
shire.  It  is  said  that  this  object  fell  alone,  or  without  hailstones. 

Altogether,  though  it  is  not  so  strong  for  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea, 
I  think  this  is  one  of  our  best  expressions  upon  external  origins. 
That  large  blocks  of  ice  could  form  in  the  moisture  of  this  earth's 
atmosphere  is  about  as  likely  as  that  blocks  of  stone  could  form  in 
a  dust  whirl.  Of  course,  if  ice  or  water  comes  to  this  earth  from 
external  sources,  we  think  of  at  least  minute  organisms  in  it,  and 
on,  with  our  data,  to  frogs,  fishes;  on  to  anything  that's  thinkable, 
coming  from  external  sources.  It's  of  great  importance  to  us  to 
accept  that  large  lumps  of  ice  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  but  what  we 
desire  most — perhaps  because  of  our  interest  in  its  archaeologic 
and  paleontologic  treasures — is  now  to  be  through  with  tentative- 
ness  and  probation,  and  to  take  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea  into  full 
acceptance  in  our  more  advanced  fold  of  the  chosen  of  this  twentieth 
century. 

In  the  Report  of  the  British  Association,  1855-37,  it  is  said 
that,  at  Poorhundur,  India,  Dec.  n,  1854,  flat  pieces  of  ice,  many 
of  them  weighing  several  pounds — each,  I  suppose — had  fallen  from 
the  sky.  They  are  described  as  "large  ice-flakes." 

Vast  fields  of  ice  in  the  Super-Arctic  regions,  or  strata,  of  the 
Super-Sargasso  Sea.  When  they  break  up,  their  fragments  are 
flake-like.  In  our  acceptance,  there  are  aerial  ice-fields  that  are 
remote  from  this  earth;  that  break  up,  fragments  grinding  against 
one  another,  rolling  in  vapor  and  water,  of  different  constituency  in 
different  regions,  forming  slowly  as  stratified  hailstones — but  that 
there  are  ice-fields  near  this  earth,  that  break  up  into  just  such 
flat  pieces  of  ice  as  cover  any  pond  or  river  when  ice  of  a  pond  or 
river  is  broken,  and  are  sometimes  soon  precipitated  to  the  earth, 
in  this  familiar  flat  formation. 

Symons'  Met.  Mag.,  43-154: 

A  correspondent  writes  that,  at  Braemar,  July  2,  1908,  when  the 
sky  was  clear  overhead,  and  the  sun  shining,  flat  pieces  of  ice  fell 
— from  somewhere.  The  sun  was  shining,  but  something  was  going 
on  somewhere:  thunder  was  heard. 

Until  I  saw  the  reproduction  of  a  photograph  in  the  Scientific 
American,  Feb.  21,  1914,  I  had  supposed  that  these  ice-fields  must 
be,  say,  at  least  ten  or  twenty  miles  away  from  this  earth,  and 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  179 

invisible,  to  terrestrial  observers,  except  as  the  blurs  that  have  so 
often  been  reported  by  astronomers  and  meteorologists.  The  photo- 
graph published  by  the  Scientific  American  is  of  an  aggregation  sup- 
posed to  be  clouds,  presumably  not  very  high,  so  clearly  detailed  are 
they.  The  writer  says  that  they  looked  to  him  like  "a  field  of 
broken  ice."  Beneath  is  a  picture  of  a  conventional  field  of  ice, 
floating  ordinarily  in  water.  The  resemblance  between  the  two 
pictures  is  striking — nevertheless,  it  seems  to  me  incredible  that  the 
first  of  the  photographs  could  be  of  an  aerial  ice-field,  or  that  gravi- 
tation could  cease  to  act  at  only  a  mile  or  so  from  this  earth's  sur- 

Unless: 

The  exceptional:  the  flux  and  vagary  of  all  things. 

Or  that  normally  this  earth's  gravitation  extends,  say,  ten  or 
fifteen  miles  outward — but  that  gravitation  must  be  rhythmic. 

Of  course,  in  the  pseudo-formulas  of  astronomers,  gravitation  as 
a  fixed  quantity  is  essential.  Accept  that  gravitation  is  a  variable 
force,  and  astronomers  deflate,  with  a  perceptible  hissing  sound,  into 
the  punctured  condition  of  economists,  biologists,  meteorologists, 
and  all  the  others  of  the  humbler  divinities,  who  can  admittedly 
offer  only  insecure  approximations. 

We  refer  all  who  would  not  like  to  hear  the  hiss  of  escaping 
arrogance,  to  Herbert  Spencer's  chapters  upon  the  rhythm  of  all 
phenomena. 

If  everything  else — light  from  the  stars,  heat  from  the  sun,  the 
winds  and  the  tides;  forms  and  colors  and  sizes  of  animals;  de- 
mands and  supplies  and  prices;  political  opinions  and  chemic  re- 
actions and  religious  doctrines  and  magnetic  intensities  and  the 
ticking  of  clocks ;  and  arrival  and  departure  of  the  seasons — if  every- 
thing else  is  variable,  we  accept  that  the  notion  of  gravitation  as  fixed 
and  formulable  is  only  another  attempted  positivism,  doomed,  like 
all  other  illusions  of  realness  in  quasi-existence.  So  it  is  inter- 
mediatism  to  accept  that,  though  gravitation  may  approximate  high- 
er to  invariability  than  do  the  winds,  for  instance,  it  must  be  some- 
where between  the  Absolutes  of  Stability  and  Instability.  Here 
then  we  are  not  much  impressed  with  the  opposition  of  physicists 
and  astronomers,  fearing,  a  little  mournfully,  that  their  language  is 
of  expiring  sibilations. 

So  then  the  fields  of  ice  in  the  sky,  and  that,  though  usually  so  far 
away  as  to  be  mere  blurs,  at  times  they  come  close  enough  to  be 
seen  in  detail.  For  description  of  what  I  call  a  "blur,"  see  Pop.  Set. 


i8o  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

News,  Feb.,  1884 — sky,  in  general,  unusually  clear,  but,  near  the 
sun,  "a  white,  slightly  curdled  haze,  which  was  dazzlingly  bright." 

We  accept  that  sometimes  fields  of  ice  pass  between  the  sun  and 
the  earth:  that  many  strata  of  ice,  or  very  thick  fields  of  ice,  or 
superimposed  fields  would  obscure  the  sun — that  there  have  been 
occasions  when  the  sun  was  eclipsed  by  fields  of  ice: 

Flammarion,  "The  Atmosphere,"  p.  394: 

That  a  profound  darkness  came  upon  the  city  of  Brussels,  June 
18,  1839: 

There  fell  flat  pieces  of  ice,  an  inch  long. 

Intense  darkness  at  Aitkin,  Minn.,  April  2,  1889:  sand  and 
"solid  chunks  of  ice"  reported  to  have  fallen  (Science,  April  19, 
1889). 

In  Sy marts'  Meteorological  Magazine,  32-172,  are  outlined  rough- 
edged  but  smooth-surfaced  pieces  of  ice  that  fell  at  Manassas,  Vir- 
ginia, Aug.  10,  1897.  They  look  as  much  like  the  roughly  broken 
fragments  of  a  smooth  sheet  of  ice — as  ever  have  roughly  broken 
fragments  of  a  smooth  sheet  of  ice  looked.  About  two  inches  across, 
and  one  iach  thick.  In  Cosmos,  3-116,  it  is  said  that,  at  Rouen, 
July  5,  1853,  fell  irregular-shaped  pieces  of  ice,  about  the  size  of  a 
hand,  described  as  looking  as  if  all  had  been  broken  from  one 
enormous  block  of  ice.  That  I  think  was  an  aerial  iceberg.  In  the 
awful  density,  or  almost  absolute  stupidity  of  the  i9th  century,  it 
never  occurred  to  anybody  to  look  for  traces  of  polar  bears  or  of 
seals  upon  these  fragments. 

Of  course,  seeing  what  we  want  to  see,  having  been  able  to 
gather  these  data  only  because  they  are  in  agreement  with  notions 
formed  in  advance,  we  are  not  so  respectful  to  our  own  notions  as 
to  a  similar  impression  forced  upon  an  observer  who  had  no  theory 
or  acceptance  to  support.  In  general,  our  prejudices  see  and  our 
prejudices  investigate,  but  this  should  not  be  taken  as  an  abso- 
lute. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  July,  1894: 

That,  from  the  Weather  Bureau,  of  Portland,  Oregon,  a  tornado, 
of  June  3,  1894,  was  reported. 

Fragments  of  ice  fell  from  the  sky. 

They  averaged  three  to  four  inches  square,  and  about  an  inch 
thick.  In  length  and  breadth  they  had  the  smooth  surfaces  re- 
quired by  our  acceptance:  and,  according  to  the  writer  in  the 
Review,  "gave  the  impression  of  a  vast  field  of  ice  suspended  in  the 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  181 

atmosphere,  and  suddenly  broken  into  fragments  about  the  size  of 
the  palm  of  the  hand." 

This  datum,  profoundly  of  what  we  used  to  call  the  "damned," 
or  before  we  could  no  longer  accept  judgment,  or  cut  and  dried 
condemnation  by  infants,  turtles,  and  lambs,  was  copied — but  with- 
out comment — in  the  Scientific  American,  71-371. 

Our  theology  is  something  like  this: 

Of  course  we  ought  to  be  damned — but  we  revolt  against  adjudi- 
cation by  infants,  turtles,  and  lambs. 

We  now  come  to  some  remarkable  data  in  a  rather  difficult  de- 
partment of  super-geography.  Vast  fields  of  aerial  ice.  There's 
a  lesson  to  me  in  the  treachery  of  the  imaginable.  Most  of  our 
opposition  is  in  the  clearness  with  which  the  conventional,  but  im- 
possible, becomes  the  imaginable,  and  then  the  resistant  to  modifi- 
cations. After  it  had  become  the  conventional  with  me,  I  con- 
ceived clearly  of  vast  sheets  of  ice,  a  few  miles  above  this  earth — 
then  the  shining  of  the  sun,  and  the  ice  partly  melting — that  note 
upon  the  ice  that  fell  at  Derby — water  trickling  and  forming  icicles 
upon  the  lower  surface  of  the  ice  sheet.  I  seemed  to  look  up  and 
so  clearly  visualized  those  icicles  hanging  like  stalactites  from  a 
flat-roofed  cave,  in  white  calcite.  Or  I  looked  up  at  the  under  side 
of  an  aerial  ice-lump,  and  seemed  to  see  a  papillation  similar  to  that 
observed  by  a  calf  at  times.  But  then — but  then — if  icicles  should 
form  upon  the  under  side  of  a  sheet  of  aerial  ice,  that  would  be 
by  the  falling  of  water  toward  this  earth;  an  icicle  is  of  course  an 
expression  of  gravitation — and,  if  water  melting  from  ice  should 
fall  toward  this  earth,  why  not  the  ice  itself  fall  before  an  icicle 
could  have  time  to  form?  Of  course,  in  quasi-existence,  where 
everything  is  a  paradox,  one  might  argue  that  the  water  falls,  but  the 
ice  does  not,  because  the  ice  is  heavier — that  is,  in  masses.  That 
notion,  I  think,  belongs  in  a  more  advanced  course  than  we  are 
taking  at  present. 

Our  expression  upon  icicles: 

A  vast  field  of  aerial  ice — it  is  inert  to  this  earth's  gravitation — 
but  by  universal  flux  and  variation,  part  of  it  sags  closer  to  this 
earth,  and  is  susceptible  to  gravitation — by  cohesion  with  the  main 
mass,  this  part  does  not  fall,  but  water  melting  from  it  does  fall, 
and  forms  icicles — then,  by  various  disturbances,  this  part  sometimes 
falls  in  fragments  that  are  protrusive  with  icicles. 

Of  the  ice  that  fell,  some  of  it  enclosing  living  frogs,  at  Dubuque, 
Iowa,  June  16,  1882,  it  is  said  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  June, 


182  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

1882)  that  there  were  pieces  from  one  to  seventeen  inches  in  cir- 
cumference, the  largest  weighing  one  pound  and  three-quarters — 
that  upon  some  of  them  were  icicles  half  an  inch  in  length.  We 
emphasize  that  these  objects  were  not  hailstones. 

The  only  merger  is  that  of  knobby  hailstones,  or  of  large  hail- 
stones with  protuberances  wrought  by  crystallization:  but  that  is 
no  merger  with  terrestrial  phenomena,  and  such  formations  are 
unaccountable  to  orthodoxy;  or  it  is  incredible  that  hail  could  so 
crystallize — not  forming  by  accretion — in  the  fall  of  a  few  seconds. 
For  an  account  of  such  hailstones,  see  Nature,  61-594.  Note  the 
size — "some  of  them  the  size  of  turkeys*  eggs." 

It  is  our  expression  that  sometimes  the  icicles  themselves  have 
fallen,  as  if  by  concussion,  or  as  if  something  had  swept  against 
the  under  side  of  an  aerial  ice  floe,  detaching  its  papillations. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  June,  1889: 

That,  at  Oswego,  N.  Y.,  June  n,  1889,  according  to  the  Turin 
(N.  Y.)  Leader,  there  fell,  in  a  thunderstorm,  pieces  of  ice  that 
"resembled  the  fragments  of  icicles." 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  29-506: 

That  on  Florence  Island,  St.  Lawrence  River,  Aug.  8,  1901,  with 
ordinary  hail,  fell  pieces  of  ice  "formed  like  icicles,  the  size  and 
shape  of  lead  pencils  that  had  been  cut  into  sections  about  three- 
eighths  of  an  inch  in  length." 

So  our  data  of  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  and  its  Arctic  region:  and, 
for  weeks  at  a  time,  an  ice  field  may  hang  motionless  over  a  part 
of  this  earth's  surface — the  sun  has  some  effect  upon  it,  but  not 
much  until  late  in  the  afternoon,  I  should  say — part  of  it  has 
sagged,  but  is  held  up  by  cohesion  with  the  main  mass — whereupon 
we  have  such  an  occurrence  as  would  have  been  a  little  uncanny 
to  us  once  upon  a  time — or  fall  of  water  from  a  cloudless  sky,  day 
after  day,  in  one  small  part  of  this  earth's  surface,  late  in  the 
afternoon,  when  the  sun's  rays  had  had  time  for  their  effects: 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  Oct.,  1886: 

That,  according  to  the  Charlotte  Chronicle,  Oct.  21,  1886,  for 
three  weeks  there  had  been  a  fall  of  water  from  the  sky,  in  Char- 
lotte, N.  C.,  localized  in  one  particular  spot,  every  afternoon,  about 
three  o'clock;  that,  whether  the  sky  was  cloudy  or  cloudless,  the 
water  or  rain  fell  upon  a  small  patch  of  land  between  two  trees  and 
nowhere  else. 

This  is  the  newspaper  account,  and,  as  such,  it  seems  in  the 
depths  of  the  unchosen,  either  by  me  or  any  other  expression  of  the 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  183 

Salvation  Army.    The  account  by  the  Signal  Service  observer,  at 
Charlotte,  published  in  the  Review,  follows: 

"An  unusual  phenomenon  was  witnessed  on  the  2ist:  having  been 
informed  that,  for  some  weeks  prior  to  date,  rain  had  been  falling 
daily,  after  3  p.  m.,  on  a  particular  spot,  near  two  trees,  corner 
of  9th  and  D  streets,  I  visited  the  place,  and  saw  precipitation  in 
the  form  of  rain  drops  at  4.47  and  4.55  p.  m.,  while  the  sun  was 
shining  brightly.  On  the  22nd,  I  again  visited  the  place,  and  from 
4.05  to  4.25  p.  m.,  a  light  shower  of  rain  fell  from  a  cloudless 
sky.  .  .  .  Sometimes  the  precipitation  falls  over  an  area  of  half 
an  acre,  but  always  appears  to  center  at  these  two  trees,  and  when 
lightest  occurs  there  only." 


CHAPTER  XW 

WE  see  conventionally.  It  is  not  only  that  we  think  and  act 
and  speak  and  dress  alike,  because  of  our  surrender  to  social 
attempt  at  Entity,  in  which  we  are  only  super-cellular.  We  see 
what  it  is  "proper"  that  we  should  see.  It  is  orthodox  enough  to 
say  that  a  horse  is  not  a  horse,  to  an  infant — any  more  than  is  an 
orange  an  orange  to  the  unsophisticated.  It's  interesting  to  walk 
along  a  street  sometimes  and  look  at  things  and  wonder  what  they'd 
look  like,  if  we  hadn't  been  taught  to  see  horses  and  trees  and  houses 
as  horses  and  trees  and  houses.  I  think  that  to  super-sight  they 
are  local  stresses  merging  indistinguishably  into  one  another,  in  an 
all-inclusive  nexus. 

I  think  that  it  would  be  credible  enough  to  say  that  many  times 
have  Monstrator  and  Elvera  and  Azuria  crossed  telescopic  fields 
of  vision,  and  were  not  even  seen — because  it  wouldn't  be  proper 
to  see  them;  it  wouldn't  be  respectable,  and  it  wouldn't  be  respect- 
ful: it  would  be  insulting  to  old  bones  to  see  them:  it  would  bring 
on  evil  influences  from  the  relics  of  St.  Isaac  to  see  them. 

But  our  data: 

Of  vast  worlds  that  are  orbitless,  or  that  are  navigable,  or  that 
are  adrift  in  inter-planetary  tides  and  currents:  the  data  that  we 
shall  have  of  their  approach,  in  modern  times,  within  five  or  six 
miles  of  this  earth 

But  then  their  visits,  or  approaches,  to  other  planets,  or  to  other 
of  the  few  regularized  bodies  that  have  surrendered  to  the  attempted 
Entity  of  this  solar  system  as  a  whole 

The  question  that  we  can't  very  well  evade: 

Have  these  other  worlds,  or  super-constructions,  ever  been  seen 
by  astronomers? 

I  think  there  would  not  be  much  approximation  to  realness  in 
taking  refuge  in  the  notion  of  astronomers  who  stare  and  squint  and 
see  only  that  which  it  is  respectable  and  respectful  to  see.  It  is 
all  very  well  to  say  that  astronomers  are  hypnotics,  anc|  that  an 
astronomer  looking  at  the  rqoon  is  hypnotized  by  the  moon,  but 
our  acceptance  is  that  the  bodies  of  this  present  expression  often 

184 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  185 

visit  the  moon,  or  cross  it,  or  are  held  in  temporary  suspension  near 
it — then  some  of  them  must  often  have  been  within  the  diameter  of 
an  astronomer's  hypnosis. 

Our  general  expression: 

That,  upon  the  oceans  of  this  earth,  there  are  regularized  vessels, 
but  also  that  there  are  tramp  vessels: 

That,  upon  the  super-ocean,  there  are  regularized  planets,  but 
also  that  there  are  tramp  worlds: 

That  astronomers  are  like  mercantile  purists  who  would  deny 
commercial  vagabondage. 

Our  acceptance  is  that  vast  celestial  vagabonds  have  been  ex- 
cluded by  astronomers,  primarily  because  their  irresponsibilities  are 
an  affront  to  the  pure  and  the  precise,  or  to  attempted  positivism; 
and  secondarily  because  they  have  not  been  seen  so  very  often. 
The  planets  steadily  reflect  the  light  of  the  sun:  upon  this  uni- 
formity a  system  that  we  call  Primary  Astronomy  has  been  built 
up;  but  now  the  subject-matter  of  Advanced  Astronomy  is  data  of 
celestial  phenomena  that  are  sometimes  light  and  sometimes  dark, 
varying  like  some  of  the  satellites  of  Jupiter,  but  with  a  wider 
range.  However,  light  or  dark,  they  have  been  seen  and  reported 
so  often  that  the  only  important  reason  for  their  exclusion  is — that 
they  don't  fit  in. 

With  dark  bodies  that  are  probably  external  to  our  own  solar 
system,  I  have,  in  the  provincialism  that  no  one  can  escape,  not 
much  concern.  Dark  bodies  afloat  in  outer  space  would  have  been 
damned  a  few  years  ago,  but  now  they're  sanctioned  by  Prof. 
Barnard — and,  if  he  says  they're  all  right,  you  may  think  of  them 
without  the  fear  of  doing  something  wrong  or  ridiculous — the  close 
kinship  we  note  so  often  between  the  evil  and  the  absurd — I  suppose 
by  the  ridiculous  I  mean  the  froth  of  evil.  The  dark  companion  of 
Algol,  for  instance.  Though  that's  a  clear  case  of  celestial  mis- 
cegenation, the  purists,  or  positivists,  admit  that's  so.  In  the  Pro- 
ceedings of  the  National  Academy  oj  Science,  1915-394,  Prof. 
Barnard  writes  of  an  object — he  calls  it  an  "object" — in  Cephus. 
His  idea  is  that  there  are  dark,  opaque  bodies  outside  this  solar 
system.  But  in  the  Astrophysical  Journal,  1916-1,  he  modifies  into 
regarding  them  as  "dark  nebulae."  That's  not  so  interesting. 

We  accept  that  Venus,  for  instance,  has  often  been  visited  by 
other  worlds,  or  by  super-constructions,  from  which  come  cinders 
and  coke  and  coal;  that  sometimes  these  things  have  reflected  light 
and  have  been  seen  from  this  earth — by  professional  astronomers. 


i86  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

It  will  be  noted  that  throughout  this  chapter  our  data  are  accursed 
Brahmins — as,  by  hypnosis  and  inertia,  we  keep  on  and  keep  on 
saying,  just  as  a  good  many  of  the  scientists  of  the  ipth  century 
kept  on  and  kept  on  admitting  the  power  of  the  system  that  preceded 
them — or  Continuity  would  be  smashed.  There's  a  big  chance 
here  for  us  to  be  instantaneously  translated  to  the  Positive  Abso- 
lute— oh,  well 

What  I  emphasize  here  is  that  our  damned  data  are  observations 
by  astronomers  of  the  highest  standing,  excommunicated  by  as- 
tronomers of  similar  standing — but  backed  up  by  the  dominant 
spirit  of  their  era — to  which  all  minds  had  to  equilibrate  or  be 
negligible,  unheard,  submerged.  It  would  seem  sometimes,  in  this 
book,  as  if  our  revolts  were  against  the  dogmatisms  and  pontifica- 
tions  of  single  scientists  of  eminence.  This  is  only  a  convenience," 
because  it  seems  necessary  to  personify.  If  we  look  over  Philosophi- 
cal Transactions,  or  the  publications  of  the  Royal  Astronomical  So- 
ciety, for  instance,  we  see  that  Herschel,  for  instance,  was  as  pow- 
erless as  any  boy  star-gazer,  to  enforce  acceptance  of  any  observa- 
tion of  his  that  did  not  harmonize  with  the  system  that  was  growing 
up  as  independently  of  him  and  all  other  astronomers,  as  a  phase 
in  the  development  of  an  embryo  compels  all  cells  to  take  on  ap- 
pearances concordantly  with  the  design  and  the  predetermined 
progress  and  schedule  of  the  whole. 

Visitors  to  Venus: 

Evans,  "Ways  of  the  Planets,"  p.  140: 

That,  in  1645,  a  body  large  enough  to  look  like  a  satellite  was 
seen  near  Venus.  Four  times  in  the  first  half  of  the  i8th  century, 
a  similar  observation  was  reported.  The  last  report  occurred  in 
1767. 

A  large  body  has  been  seen — seven  times,  according  to  Science 
Gossip,  1886-178 — near  Venus.  At  least  one  astronomer,  Houzeau, 
accepted  these  observations  and  named  the — world,  planet,  super- 
construction — "Neith."  His  views  are  mentioned  "in  passing,  but 
without  endorsement,"  in  the  Trans.  N.  Y.  Acad.,  5-249. 

Houzeau  or  some  one  writing  for  the  magazine-section  of  a  Sun- 
day newspaper — outer  darkness  for  both  alike.  A  new  satellite  in 
this  solar  system  might  be  a  little  disturbing — though  the  formulas 
of  La  Place,  which  were  considered  final  in  his  day,  have  survived 
the  admittance  of  five  or  six  hundred  bodies  not  included  in  those 
formulas — a  satellite  to  Venus  might  be  a  little  disturbing,  but  would 
be  explained — but  a  large  body  approaching  a  planet — staying  a 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  187 

while — going  away — coming  back  some  other  time — anchoring,  as 
it  were 

Azuria  is  pretty  bad,  but  Azuria  is  no  worse  than  Neith. 

Astro  physical  Journal,  1-127: 

A  light-reflecting  body,  or  a  bright  spot  near  Mars:  seen  Nov. 
25,  1894,  by  Prof.  Pickering  and  others,  at  the  Lowell  Observatory, 
above  an  unilluminated  part  of  Mars — self-luminous,  it  would  seem 
— thought  to  have  been  a  cloud — but  estimated  to  have  been  about 
twenty  miles  away  from  the  planet. 

Luminous  spot  seen  moving  across  the  disk  of  Mercury,  in  1799, 
by  Harding  and  Schroeter.  (Monthly  Notices  of  the  R.  A.  S., 
38-338.) 

In  the  first  Bulletin  issued  by  the  Lowell  Observatory,  in  1903, 
Prof.  Lowell  describes  a  body  that  was  seen  on  the  terminator  of 
Mars,  May  20,  1903.  On  May  27,  it  was  "suspected."  If  still 
there,  it  had  moved,  we  are  told,  about  300  miles — "probably  a  dust 
cloud." 

Very  conspicuous  and  brilliant  spots  seen  on  the  disk  of  Mars, 
Oct.  and  Nov.,  1911.  (Popular  Astronomy,  Vol.  19,  No.  10.) 

So  one  of  them  accepted  six  or  seven  observations  that  were  in 
agreement,  except  that  they  could  not  be  regularized,  upon  a  world 
— planet — satellite — and  he  gave  it  a  name.  He  named  it  "Neith." 

Monstrator  and  Elvera  and  Azuria  and  Super-Romanimus 

Or  heresy  and  orthodoxy  and  the  oneness  of  all  quasiness,  and  our 
ways  and  means  and  methods  are  the  very  same.  Or,  if  we  name 
things  that  may  not  be,  we  are  not  of  lonely  guilt  in  the  nomencla- 
ture of  absences 

But  now  Leverrier  and  "Vulcan." 

Leverrier  again. 

Or  to  demonstrate  the  collapsibility  of  a  froth,  stick  a  pin  in  the 
largest  bubble  of  it.  Astronomy  and  inflation:  and  by  inflation 
we  mean  expansion  of  the  attenuated.  Or  that  the  science  of 
Astronomy  is  a  phantom-film  distended  with  myth-stuff — but  always 
our  acceptance  that  it  approximates  higher  to  substantiality  than 
did  the  system  that  preceded  it. 

So  Leverrier  and  the  "planet  Vulcan." 

And  we  repeat,  and  it  will  do  us  small  good  to  repeat.  If  you 
be  of  the  masses  that  the  astronomers  have  hypnotized — being  them- 
selves hypnotized,  or  they  could  not  hypnotize  others — or  that  the 
hypnotist's  control  is  not  the  masterful  power  that  it  is  popularly 


i88  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

supposed  to  be,  but  only  transference  of  state  from  one  hypnotic 
to  another 

If  you  be  of  the  masses  that  the  astronomers  have  hypnotized, 
you  will  not  be  able  even  to  remember.  Ten  pages  from  here,  and 
Leverrier  and  the  "planet  Vulcan"  will  have  fallen  from  your 
mind,  like  beans  from  a  magnet,  or  like  data  of  cold  meteorites  from 
the  mind  of  a  Thomson. 

Leverrier  and  the  "planet  Vulcan." 

And  much  the  good  it  will  do  us  to  repeat. 

But  at  least  temporarily  we  shall  have  an  impression  of  a  his- 
toric fiasco,  such  as,  in  our  acceptance,  could  occur  only  in  a  quasi- 
existence. 

In  1859,  Dr.  Lescarbault,  an  amateur  astronomer,  of  Orgeres, 
France,  announced  that,  upon  March  26,  of  that  year,  he  had  seen 
a  body  of  planetary  size  cross  the  sun.  We  are  in  a  subject  that  is 
now  as  unholy  to  the  present  system  as  ever  were  its  own  subjects 
to  the  system  that  preceded  it,  or  as  ever  were  slanders  against 
miracles  to  the  preceding  system.  Nevertheless  few  text-books  go 
so  far  as  quite  to  disregard  this  tragedy.  The  method  of  the  sys- 
tematists  is  slightingly  to  give  a  few  instances  of  the  unholy,  and 
dispose  of  the  few.  If  it  were  desirable  to  them  to  deny  that  there 
are  mountains  upon  this  earth,  they  would  record  a  few  observa- 
tions upon  some  slight  eminences  near  Orange,  N.  J.,  but  say  that 
commuters,  though  estimable  persons  in  several  ways,  are  likely  to 
have  their  observations  mixed.  The  text-books  casually  mention 
a  few  of  the  "supposed"  observations  upon  "Vulcan,"  and  then 
pass  on. 

Dr.  Lescarbault  wrote  to  Leverrier,  who  hastened  to  Orgeres » 

Because  this  announcement  assimilated  with  his  own  calculations 
upon  a  planet  between  Mercury  and  the  sun 

Because  this  solar  system  itself  has  never  attained  positiveness 
in  the  aspect  of  Regularity:  there  are  to  Mercury,  as  there  are  to 
Neptune,  phenomena  irrecoricilible  with  the  formulas,  or  motions 
that  betray  influence  by  something  else. 

We  are  told  that  Leverrier  "satisfied  himself  as  to  the  substantial 
accuracy  of  the  reported  observation."  The  story  of  this  investi- 
gation is  told  in  Monthly  Notices,  20-98.  It  seems  too  bad  to 
threaten  the  naive  little  thing  with  our  rude  sophistications,  but  it 
is  amusingly  of  the  ingenuousness  of  the  age  from  which  present 
dogmas  have  survived.  Lescarbault  wrote  to  Leverrier.  Lever- 
rier hastened  to  Orgeres.  But  he  was  careful  not  to  tell  Lescarbault 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  189 

who  he  was.  Went  right  in  and  "subjected  Dr.  Lescarbault  to  a 
very  severe  cross-examination" — just  the  way  you  or  I  may  feel  at 
liberty  to  go  into  anybody's  home  and  be  severe  with  people — 
"pressing  him  hard  step  by  step" — just  as  any  one  might  go  into 
some  one  else's  house  and  press  him  hard,  though  unknown  to  the 
hard-pressed  one.  Not  until  he  was  satisfied,  did  Leverrier  re- 
veal his  identity.  I  suppose  Dr.  Lescarbault  expressed  astonish- 
ment. I  think  there's  something  Utopian  about  this:  it's  so  unlike 
the  stand-offishness  of  New  York  life. 

Leverrier  gave  the  name  "Vulcan"  to  the  object  that  Dr.  Lescar- 
bault had  reported. 

By  the  same  means  by  which  he  is,  even  to  this  day,  supposed — 
by  the  faithful — to  have  discovered  Neptune,  he  had  already  an- 
nounced the  probable  existence  of  an  Intra-Mercurial  body,  or  group 
of  bodies.  He  had  five  observations  besides  Lescarbault's  upon 
something  that  had  been  seen  to  cross  the  sun.  In  accordance  with 
the  mathematical  hypnoses  of  his  era,  he  studied  these  six  transits. 
Out  of  them  he  computed  elements  giving  "Vulcan"  a  period  of 
about  20  days,  or  a  formula  for  heliocentric  longitude  at  any 
time. 

But  he  placed  the  time  of  best  observation  away  up  in  1877. 

But  even  so,  or  considering  that  he  still  had  probably  a  good  many 
years  to  live,  it  may  strike  one  that  he  was  a  little  rash — that  is  if 
one  have  not  gone  very  deep  into  the  study  of  hypnoses — that,  hav- 
ing "discovered"  Neptune  by  a  method  which,  in  our  acceptance, 
had  no  more  to  recommend  it  than  had  once  equally  well-thought-of 
methods  of  witch-finding,  he  should  not  have  taken  such  chances: 
that  if  he  was  right  as  to  Neptune,  but  should  be  wrong  as  to' 
"Vulcan,"  his  average  would  be  away  below  that  of  most  fortune- 
tellers, who  could  scarcely  hope  to  do  business  upon  a  fifty  per  cent. 
basis — all  that  the  reasoning  of  a  tyro  in  hypnoses. 

The  date: 

March  22,  1877. 

The  scientific  world  was  up  on  its  hind  legs  nosing  the  sky.  The 
thing  had  been  done  so  authoritatively.  Never  a  pope  had  said  a 
thing  with  more  of  the  seeming  of  finality.  If  six  observations  cor- 
related, what  more  could  be  asked?  The  Editor  of  Nature,  a  week 
before  the  predicted  event,  though  cautious,  said  that  it  is  difficult 
to  explain  how  six  observers,  unknown  to  one  another,  could  have 
data  that  could  be  formulated,  if  they  were  not  related  phenomena. 

In  a  way,  at  this  point  occurs  the  crisis  of  our  whole  book. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Formulas  are  against  us. 

But  can  astronomic  formulas,  backed  up  by  observations  in  agree- 
ment, taken  many  years  apart,  calculated  by  a  Leverrier,  be  as  mean- 
ingless, in  a  positive  sense,  as  all  other  quasi-things  that  we  have 
encountered  so  far? 

The  preparations  they  made,  before  March  22,  1877.  In  England, 
the  Astronomer  Royal  made  it  the  expectation  of  his  life:  notified  ob- 
servers at  Madras,  Melbourne,  Sydney,  and  New  Zealand,  and  ar- 
ranged with  observers  in  Chili  and  the  United  States.  M.  Struve  had 
prepared  for  observations  in  Siberia  and  Japan 

March  22,  1877 

Not  absolutely  hypocritically,  I  think  it's  pathetic,  myself.  If 
any  one  should  doubt  the  sincerity  of  Leverrier,  in  this  matter,  we 
note,  whether  it  has  meaning  or  not,  that  a  few  months  later  he  died. 

I  think  we'll  take  up  Monstrator,  though  there's  so  much  to  this 
subject  that  we'll  have  to  come  back. 

According  to  the  Annual  Register,  9-120,  upon  the  9th  of  August, 
1762,  M.  de  Rostan,  of  Basle,  France,  was  taking  altitudes  of  the 
sun,  at  Lausanne.  He  saw  a  vast,  spindle-shaped  body,  about  three 
of  the  sun's  digits  in  breadth  and  nine  in  length,  advancing  slowly 
across  the  disk  of  the  sun,  or  "at  no  more  than  half  the  velocity  with 
which  the  ordinary  solar  spots  move."  It  did  not  disappear  until  the 
7th  of  September,  when  it  reached  the  sun's  limb.  Because  of  the 
spindle-like  form,  I  incline  to  think  of  a  super-Zeppelin,  but  another 
observation,  which  seems  to  indicate  that  it  was  a  world,  is  that, 
though  it  was  opaque,  and  "eclipsed  the  sun,"  it  had  around  it  a  kind 
of  nebulosity — or  atmosphere?  A  penumbra  would  ordinarily  be  a 
datum  of  a  sun  spot,  but  there  are  observations  that  indicate  that 
this  object  was  at  a  considerable  distance  from  the  sun: 

It  is  recorded  that  another  observer,  at  Paris,  watching  the  sun,  at 
this  time,  had  not  seen  this  object; 

But  that  M.  Croste,  at  Sole,  about  forty-five  German  leagues 
northward  from  Lausanne,  had  seen  it,  describing  the  same  spindle- 
form,  but  disagreeing  a  little  as  to  breadth.  Then  comes  the  im- 
portant point:  that  he  and  M.  de  Rostan  did  not  see  it  upon  the  same 
part  of  the  sun.  This,  then,  is  parallax,  and,  compounded  with  in- 
visibility at  Paris,  is  great  parallax — or  that,  in  the  course  of  a 
month,  in  the  summer  of  1762,  a  large,  opaque,  spindle-shaped  body 
traversed  the  disk  of  the  sun,  but  at  a  great  distance  from  the  sun. 
The  writer  in  the  Register  says:  "In  a  word,  we  know  of  nothing  to 
have  recourse  to,  in  the  heavens,  by  which  to  explain  this  phenome- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  191 

non."  I  suppose  he  was  not  a  hopeless  addict  to  explaining.  Ex- 
traordinary— we  fear  he  must  have  been  a  man  of  loose  habits  in 
some  other  respects. 

As  to  us 

Monstrator. 

In  the  Monthly  Notices  of  the  R.  A.  S.,  Feb.,  1877,  Zeverrier,  who 
never  lost  faith,  up  to  the  last  day,  gives  the  six  observations  upon 
an  unknown  body  of  planetary  size,  that  he  had  formulated: 

Fritsche,  Oct.  10,  1802;  Stark,  Oct.  9,  1819;  De  Cuppis,  Oct.  30, 
1839;  Sidebotham,  Nov.  12,  1849;  Lescarbault,  March  26,  1859; 
Lummis,  March  20,  1862. 

If  we  weren't  so  accustomed  to  Science  in  its  essential  aspect  of 
Disregard,  we'd  be  mystified  and  impressed,  like  the  Editor  of 
Nature,  with  the  formulation  of  these  data:  agreement  of  so  many 
instances  would  seem  incredible  as  a  coincidence:  but  our  acceptance 
is  that,  with  just  enough  disregard,  astronomers  and  fortune-tellers 
can  formulate  anything — or  we'd  engage,  ourselves,  to  formulate 
periodicities  in  the  crowds  in  Broadway — say  that  every  Wednesday 
morning,  a  tall  man,  with  one  leg  and  a  black  eye,  carrying  a  rubber 
plant,  passes  the  Singer  Building,  at  quarter  past  ten  o'clock.  Of 
course  it  couldn't  really  be  done,  unless  such  a  man  did  have  such 
periodicity,  but  if  some  Wednesday  mornings  it  should  be  a  small 
child  lugging  a  barrel,  or  a  fat  negress  with  a  week's  wash,  by  or- 
dinary disregard  that  would  be  prediction  good  enough  for  the 
kind  of  quasi-existence  we're  in. 

So  whether  we  accuse,  or  whether  we  think  that  the  word  "ac- 
cuse" over-dignifies  an  attitude  toward  a  quasi-astronomer,  or  mere 
figment  in  a  super-dream,  our  acceptance  is  that  Leverrier  never  did 
formulate  observations 

That  he  picked  out  observations  that  could  be  formulated 

That  of  this  type  are  all  formulas 

That,  if  Leverrier  had  not  been  himself  helplessly  hypnotized,  or 
if  he  had  had  in  him  more  than  a  tincture  of  realness,  never  could  he 
have  been  beguiled  by  such  a  quasi-process:  but  that  he  was  hypno- 
tized, and  so  extended,  or  transferred,  his  condition  to  others,  that 
upon  March  22,  1877,  he  had  this  earth  bristling  with  telescopes, 
with  the  rigid  and  almost  inanimate  forms  of  astronomers  behind 
them 

And  not  a  blessed  thing  of  any  unusuality  was  seen  upon  that  day 
or  succeeding  days. 


192  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

But  that  the  science  of  Astronomy  suffered  the  slightest  in 
prestige? 

It  couldn't.  The  spirit  of  1877  was  behind  it.  If,  in  an  embryo, 
some  cells  should  not  live  up  to  the  phenomena  of  their  era,  the 
others  will  sustain  the  scheduled  appearances.  Not  until  an  embryo 
enters  the  mammalian  stage  are  cells  of  the  reptilian  stage  false 
cells. 

It  is  our  acceptance  that  there  were  many  equally  authentic  re- 
ports upon  large  planetary  bodies  that  had  been  seen  near  the  sun; 
that,  of  many,  Leverrier  picked  out  six;  not  then  deciding  that  all 
the  other  observations  related  to  still  other  large,  planetary  bodies, 
but  arbitrarily,  or  hypnotically,  disregarding — or  heroically  disre- 
garding— every  one  of  them — that  to  formulate  at  all  he  had  to  ex- 
clude falsely.  The  denouement  killed  him,  I  think.  I'm  not  at  all 
inclined  to  place  him  with  the  Grays  and  Hitchcocks  and  Symonses. 
Fm  not,  because,  though  it  was  rather  unsportsmanlike  to  put  the 
date  so  far  ahead,  he  did  give  a  date,  and  he  did  stick  to  it  with  such 
a  high  approximation 

I  think  Leverrier  was  translated  to  the  Positive  Absolute. 

The  disregarded: 

Observation,  of  July  26,  1819,  by  Gruthinson — but  that  was  of 
two  bodies  that  crossed  the  sun  together 

Nature,  14-469: 

That,  according  to  the  astronomer,  J.  R.  Hind,  Benjamin  Scott, 
City  Chamberlain  of  London,  and  Mr.  Wray,  had,  in  1847,  seen  a 
body  similar  to  "Vulcan"  cross  the  sun. 

Similar  observation  by  Hind  and  Lowe,  March  12,  1849  (Lf 
Annie  Scientifique,  1876-9). 

Nature,  14-505: 

Body  of  apparent  size  of  Mercury,  seen,  Jan.  29,  1860,  by  F.  A.  R. 
Russell  and  four  other  observers,  crossing  the  sun. 

De  Vico's  observation  of  July  12,  1837  ("Observatory,"  2-424). 

L'Annee  Scientifique,  1865-16: 

That  another  amateur  astronomer,  M.  Coumbray,  of  Constanti- 
nople, had  written  to  Leverrier,  that,  upon  the  8th  of  March,  1865, 
he  had  seen  a  black  point,  sharply  outlined,  traverse  the  disk  of  the 
sun.  It  detached  itself  from  a  group  of  sun  spots  near  the  limb  of 
the  sun,  and  took  48  minutes  to  reach  the  other  limb.  Figuring  upon 
the  diagram  sent  by  M.  Coumbray,  a  central  passage  would  have 
taken  a  little  more  than  an  hour.  This  observation  was  disregarded 
by  Leverrier,  because  his  formula  required  about  four  times  that 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  193 

velocity.  The  point  here  is  that  these  other  observations  are  as 
authentic  as  those  that  Leverrier  included;  that,  then,  upon  data  as 
good  as  the  data  of  "Vulcan,"  there  must  be  other  "Vulcans" — the 
heroic  and  defiant  disregard,  then,  of  trying  to  formulate  one,  omit- 
ting the  others,  which,  by  orthodox  doctrine,  must  have  influenced  it 
greatly,  if  all  were  in  the  relatively  narrow  space  between  Mercury 
and  the  sun. 

Observation  upon  another  such  body,  of  April  4,  1876,  by  M. 
Weber,  of  Berlin.  As  to  this  observation,  Leverrier  was  informed  by 
Wolf,  in  Aug.,  1876  (L'Annee  Scientifique,  1876-7).  It  made  no 
difference,  so  far  as  can  be  known,  to  this  notable  positivist. 

Two  other  observations  noted  by  Hind  and  Denning — London 
Times,  Nov.  3,  1871,  and  March  26,  1873. 

Monthly  Notices  of  the  R.  A.  5.,  20-100: 

Standacher,  Feb.,  1762;  Lichtenberg,  Nov.  19,  1762;  Hoffman, 
May.  1764;  Dangos,  Jan.  18,  1798;  Stark,  Feb.  12,  1820.  An  ob- 
servation by  Schmidt,  Oct.  n,  1847,  *s  s^d  to  be  doubtful:  but, 
upon  page  192,  it  is  said  that  this  doubt  had  arisen  because  of  a 
mistaken  translation,  and  two  other  observations  by  Schmidt  are 
given:  Oct.  14,  1849,  and  Feb.  18,  1850 — also  an  observation  by 
Lofft,  Jan.  6,  1818.  Observation  by  Steinheibel,  at  Vienna,  April  27, 
1820  (Monthly  Notices,  1862). 

Haase  had  collected  reports  of  twenty  observations  like  Lescar- 
bault's.  The  list  was  published  in  1872,  by  Wolf.  Also  there  are 
other  instances  like  Gruthinsen's: 

Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  2-28-446: 

Report  by  Pastorff  that  he  had  seen  twice  in  1836,  and  once  in 
1837,  two  round  spots  of  unequal  size,  moving  across  the  sun,  chang- 
ing position  relatively  to  each  other,  and  taking  a  different  course, 
if  not  orbit,  each  time:  that,  in  1834,  he  had  seen  similar  bodies  pass 
six  times  across  the  disk  of  the  sun,  looking  very  much  like  Mercury 
in  his  transits. 

March  22,  1876 

But  to  point  out  Leverrier's  poverty-stricken  average — or  discover- 
ing planets  upon  a  fifty  per  cent,  basis — would  be  to  point  out  the  low 
percentage  of  realness  in  the  quasi-myth-stuff  of  which  the  whole  sys- 
tem is  composed.  We  do  not  accuse  the  text-books  of  omitting  this 
fiasco,  but  we  do  note  that  theirs  is  the  conventional  adaptation  here 
of  all  beguilers  who  are  in  difficulties 

The  diverting  of  attention. 

It  wouldn't  be  possible  in  a  real  existence,  with  real  mentality,  to 


194  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

deal  with,  but  I  suppose  it's  good  enough  for  the  quasi-intellects  that 
stupefy  themselves  with  text-books.  The  trick  here  is  to  gloss  over 
Leverrier's  mistake,  and  blame  Lescarbault — he  was  only  an  ama- 
teur— had  delusions.  The  reader's  attention  is  led  against  Lescar- 
bault by  a  report  from  M.  Lias,  director  of  the  Brazilian  Coast 
Survey,  who,  at  the  time  of  Lescarbault's  "supposed"  observation 
had  been  watching  the  sun  in  Brazil,  and,  instead  of  seeing  even 
ordinary  sun  spots,  had  noted  that  the  region  of  the  "supposed 
transit"  was  of  "uniform  intensity." 

But  the  meaninglessness  of  all  utterances  in  quasi-existence 

"Uniform  intensity"  turns  our  way  as  much  as  against  us — or  some 
day  some  brain  will  conceive  a  way  of  beating  Newton's  third  law — 
if  every  reaction,  or  resistance,  is,  or  can  be,  interpretable  as  stimu- 
lus instead  of  resistance — if  this  could  be  done  in  mechanics,  there's 
a  way  open  here  for  some  one  to  own  the  world — specifically  in  this 
matter,  "uniform  intensity"  means  that  Lescarbault  saw  no  ordinary 
sun  spot,  just  as  much  as  it  means  that  no  spot  at  all  was  seen  upon 
the  sun.  Continuing  the  interpretation  of  a  resistance  as  an  assist- 
ance, which  can  always  be  done  with  mental  forces — making  us 
wonder  what  applications  could  be  made  with  steam  and  electric 
forces — we  point  out  that  invisibility  in  Brazil  means  parallax  quite 
as  truly  as  it  means  absence,  and,  inasmuch  as  "Vulcan"  was  sup- 
posed to  be  distant  from  the  sun,  we  interpret  denial  as  corrobora- 
tion — method  of  course  of  every  scientist,  politician,  theologian, 
high-school  debater. 

So  the  text-books,  with  no  especial  cleverness,  because  no  especial 
cleverness  is  needed,  lead  the  reader  into  contempt  for  the  amateur 
of  Orgeres,  and  forgetfulness  of  Leverrier — and  some  other  subject 
is  taken  up. 

But  our  own  acceptance: 

That  these  data  are  as  good  as  ever  they  were; 

That,  if  some  one  of  eminence,  should  predict  an  earthquake,  and 
if  there  should  be  no  earthquake  at  the  predicted  time,  that  would 
discredit  the  prophet,  but  data  of  past  earthquakes  would  remain  as 
good  as  ever  they  had  been.  It  is  easy  enough  to  smile  at  the  illu- 
sion of  a  single  amateur 

The  mass-formation: 

Fritsche,  Stark,  De  Cuppis,  Sidebotham,  Lescarbault,  Lummis, 
Gruthinson,  De  Vico,  Scott,  Wray,  Russell,  Hind,  Lowe,  Coumbray, 
Weber,  Standacher,  Lichtenberg,  Dangos,  Hoffman,  Schmidt,  Lofft, 
Steinheibel,  Pastorff— 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  195 

These  are  only  the  observations  conventionally  listed  relatively  to 
an  Intra-Mercurial  planet.  They  are  formidable  enough  to  prevent 
our  being  diverted,  as  if  it  were  all  the  dream  of  a  lonely  amateur — 
but  they're  a  mere  advance-guard.  From  now  on  other  data  of  large 
celestial  bodies,  some  dark  and  some  reflecting  light,  will  pass  and 
pass  and  keep  on  passing 

So  that  some  of  us  will  remember  a  thing  or  two,  after  the  pro- 
cession's over — possibly. 

Taking  up  only  one  of  the  listed  observations 

Or  our  impression  that  the  discrediting  of  Leverrier  has  nothing  to 
do  with  the  acceptability  of  these  data: 

In  the  London  Times,  Jan.  10,  1860,  is  Benjamin  Scott's  account 
of  his  observation: 

That,  in  the  summer  of  1847,  he  had  seen  a  body  that  had  seemed 
to  be  the  size  of  Venus,  crossing  the  sun.  He  says  that,  hardly  be- 
lieving the  evidence  of  his  sense  of  sight,  he  had  looked  for  some 
one,  whose  hopes  or  ambitions  would  not  make  him  so  subject  to 
illusion.  He  had  told  his  little  son,  aged  five  years,  to  look  through 
the  telescope.  The  child  had  exclaimed  that  he  had  seen  "a  little 
balloon"  crossing  the  sun.  Scott  says  that  he  had  not  had  sufficient 
self-reliance  to  make  public  announcement  of  his  remarkable  ob- 
servation at  the  time,  but  that,  in  the  evening  of  the  same  day,  he 
had  told  Dr.  Dick,  F.R.A.S.,  who  had  cited  other  instances.  In  the 
Times,  Jan.  12,  1860,  is  published  a  letter  from  Richard  Abbott, 
F.R.A.S.:  that  he  remembered  Mr.  Scott's  letter  to  him  upon  this 
observation,  at  the  time  of  the  occurrence. 

I  suppose  that,  at  the  beginning  of  this  chapter,  one  had  the  notion 
that,  by  hard  scratching  through  musty  old  records  we  might  rake  up 
vague,  more  than  doubtful  data,  distortable  into  what's  called  evi- 
dence of  unrecognized  worlds  or  constructions  of  planetary  size 

But  the  high  authenticity  and  the  support  and  the  modernity  of 
these  of  the  accursed  that  we  are  now  considering 

And  our  acceptance  that  ours  is  a  quasi-existence,  in  which  above 
all  other  things,  hopes,  ambitions,  emotions,  motivations,  stands 
Attempt  to  Positivize:  that  we  are  here  considering  an  attempt  to 
systematize  that  is  sheer  fanaticism  in  its  disregard  of  the  unsys- 
tematizable — that  it  represented  the  highest  good  in  the  igth  cen- 
tury— that  it  is  mono-mania,  but  heroic  mono-mania  that  was  quasi- 
divine  in  the  igth  century 

But  that  this  isn't  the  ipth  century. 

As  a  doubly  sponsored  Brahmin — in  the  regard  of  Baptists — the 


196  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

objects  of  July  29,  1878,  stand  out  and  proclaim  themselves  so  that 
nothing  but  disregard  of  the  intensity  of  mono-mania  can  account 
for  their  reception  by  the  system: 

Or  the  total  eclipse  of  July  29,  1878,  and  the  reports  by  Prof. 
Watson,  from  Rawlins,  Wyoming,  and  by  Prof.  Swift,  from  Denver, 
Colorado:  that  they  had  seen  two  shining  objects  at  a  considerable 
distance  from  the  sun. 

It's  quite  in  accord  with  our  general  expression:  not  that  there  is 
an  Intra-Mercurial  plapet,  but  that  there  are  different  bodies,  many 
vast  things;  near  this  earth  sometimes,  near  the  sun  sometimes; 
orbitless  worlds,  which,  because  of  scarcely  any  data  of  collisions, 
we  think  of  as  under  navigable  control — or  dirigible  super-construc- 
tions. 

Prof.  Watson  and  Prof.  Swift  published  their  observations. 

Then  the  disregard  that  we  can  not  think  of  in  terms  of  ordinary, 
sane  exclusions. 

The  text-book  systematists  begin  by  telling  us  that  the  trouble 
with  these  observations  is  that  they  disagree  widely:  there  is  con- 
siderable respectfulness,  especially  for  Prof.  Swift,  but  we  are  told 
that  by  coincidence  these  two  astronomers,  hundreds  of  miles  apart, 
were  illuded:  their  observations  were  so  different 

Prof.  Swift  (Nature,  Sept.  19,  1878): 

That  his  own  observation  was  "in  close  approximation  to  that 
given  by  Prof.  Watson." 

In  the  Observatory,  2-161,  Swift  says  that  his  observations  and 
Watson's  were  "confirmatory  of  each  other." 

The  faithful  try  again: 

That  Watson  and  Swift  mistook  stars  for  other  bodies. 

In  the  Observatory,  2-193,  Prof.  Watson  says  that  he  had  pre- 
viously committed  to  memory  all  stars  near  the  sun,  down  to  the 
seventh  magnitude " 

And  he's  damned  anyway. 

How  such  exclusions  work  out  is  shown  by  Lockyer  (Nature, 
Aug.  20,  1878).  He  says:  "There  is  little  doubt  that  an  Intra- 
Mercurial  planet  has  been  discovered  by  Prof.  Watson." 

That  was  before  excommunication  was  pronounced. 

He  says: 

"If  it  will  fit  one  of  Leverrier's  orbits" 

It  didn't  fit. 

In  Nature,  21-301,  Prof.  Swift  says: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  197 

"I  have  never  made  a  more  valid  observation,  nor  one  more 
free  from  doubt." 

He's  damned  anyway. 

We  shall  have  some  data  that  will  not  live  up  to  most  rigorous 
requirements,  but,  if  any  one  would  like  to  read  how  carefully  and 
minutely  these  two  sets  of  observations  were  made,  see  Prof. 
Swift's  detailed  description  in  the  Am.  Jour.  Sci.,  116-313;  and  the 
technicalities  of  Prof.  Watson's  observations  in  Monthly  Notices, 

38-525- 

Our  own  acceptance  upon  dirigible  worlds,  which  is  assuredly 
enough,  more  nearly  real  than  attempted  concepts  of  large  planets 
relatively  near  this  earth,  moving  in  orbits,  but  visible  only  occa- 
sionally; which  more  nearly  approximates  to  reasonableness  than 
does  wholesale  slaughter  of  Swift  and  Watson  and  Fritsche  and 
Stark  and  De  Cuppis — but  our  own  acceptance  is  so  painful  to 
so  many  minds  that,  in  another  of  the  charitable  moments  that 
we  have  now  and  then  for  the  sake  of  contrast,  we  offer  relief: 

The  things  seen  high  in  the  sky  by  Swift  and  Watson 

Well,  only  two  months  before — the  horse  and  the  barn 

We  go  on  with  more  observations  by  astronomers,  recognizing 
that  it  is  the  very  thing  that  has  given  them  life,  sustained  them, 
held  them  together,  that  has  crushed  all  but  the  quasi-gleam  of  inde- 
pendent life  out  of  them.  Were  they  not  systematized,  they  could 
not  be  at  all,  except  sporadically  and  without  sustenance.  They 
are  systematized:  they  must  not  vary  frcm  the  conditions  of  the 
system:  they  must  not  break  away  for  themselves. 

The  two  great  commandments: 

Thou  shalt  not  break  Continuity; 

Thou  shalt  try. 

We  go  on  with  these  disregarded  data,  some  of  which,  many  of 
which,  are  of  the  highest  degree  of  acceptability.  It  is  the  System 
that  pulls  back  its  variations,  as  this  earth  is  pulling  back  the 
Matterhorn.  It  is  the  System  that  nourishes  and  rewards,  and  also 
freezes  out  life  with  the  chill  of  disregard.  We  do  note  that,  before 
excommunication  is  pronounced,  orthodox  journals  do  liberally 
enough  record  unassimilable  observations. 

All  things  merge  away  into  everything  else. 

That  is  Continuity. 

So  the  System  merges  away  and  evades  us  when  we  try  to  focus 
against  it. 

We  have  complained  a  great  deal.   At  least  we  are  not  so  dull 


198  BOOK  OF  [THE  DAMNED 

as  to  have  the  delusion  that  we  know  just  exactly  what  it  is  that 
we  are  complaining  about.  We  speak  seemingly  definitely  enough 
of  "the  System,"  but  we're  building  upon  observations  by  members 
of  that  very  system.  Or  what  we  are  doing — gathering  up  the 
loose  heresies  of  the  orthodox.  Of  course  "the  System"  fringes 
and  ravels  away,  having  no  real  outline.  A  Swift  will  antagonize 
"the  System,"  and  a  Lockyer  will  call  him  back;  but,  then,  a 
Lockyer  will  vary  with  a  "meteoric  hypothesis,"  and  a  Swift  will, 
in  turn,  represent  "the  System."  This  state  is  to  us  typical  of 
all  intermediatist  phenomena;  or  that  not  conceivably  is  anything 
really  anything,  if  its  parts  are  likely  to  be  their  own  opposites  at 
any  time.  We  speak  of  astronomers — as  if  there  were  real  astron- 
omers— but  who  have  lost  their  identity  in  a  System — as  if  it  were 
a  real  System — but  behind  that  System  is  plainly  a  rapport,  or  loss 
of  identity  in  the  Spirit  of  an  Era. 

Bodies  that  have  looked  like  dark  bodies,  and  lights  that  may 
have  been  sunlight  reflected  from  interplanetary — objects,  masses, 
constructions 

Lights  that  have  been  seen  upon — or  near? — the  moon: 

In  Philosophical  Transactions,  82-27,  is  Herschel's  report  upon 
many  luminous  points,  which  he  saw  upon — or  near? — the  moon, 
during  an  eclipse.  Why  they  should  be  luminous,  whereas  the  moon 
itself  was  dark,  would  get  us  into  a  lot  of  trouble — except  that  later 
we  shall,  or  we  sha'n't,  accept  that  many  times  have  luminous  ob- 
jects been  seen  close  to  this  earth — at  night 

But  numerousness  is  a  new  factor,  or  new  disturbance,  to  our 
explorations 

A  new  aspect  of  inter-planetary  inhabitancy  or  occupancy 

Worlds  in  hordes — or  beings — winged  beings  perhaps — wouldn't 
astonish  me  if  we  should  end  up  by  discovering  angels — or  beings 
in  machines — argosies  of  celestial  voyagers 

In  1783  and  1787,  Herschel  reported  more  lights  on  or  near  the 
moon,  which  he  supposed  were  volcanic. 

The  word  of  a  Herschel  has  had  no  more  weight,  in  divergences 
from  the  orthodox,  than  has  had  the  word  of  a  Lescarbault.  These 
observations  are  of  the  disregarded. 

Bright  spots  seen  on  the  moon,  Nov.,  1821  (Proc.  London  Roy. 
Soc.,  2-167). 

For  four  other  instances,  see  Loomis  ("Treatise  on  Astronomy," 
p.  174). 

A  moving  light  is  reported  in  Phil.  Trans.,  84-429.  To  the  writer, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  199 

it  looked  like  a  star  passing  over  the  moon — "which,  on  the  next 
moment's  consideration  I  knew  to  be  impossible."  "It  was  a  fixed, 
steady  light  upon  the  dark  part  of  the  moon."  I  suppose  "fixed" 
applies  to  luster. 

In  the  Report  of  the  Brit.  Assoc.,  1847-18,  there  is  an  observation 
by  Rankin,  upon  luminous  points  seen  on  the  shaded  part  of  the 
moon,  during  an  eclipse.  They  seemed  to  this  observer  like  reflec- 
tions of  stars.  That's  not  very  reasonable:  however,  we  have,  in 
the  Annual  Register,  1821-687,  a  light  not  referable  to  a  star — 
because  it  moved  with  the  moon:  was  seen  three  nights  in  succes- 
sion; reported  by  Capt.  Kater.  See  Quart.  Jour.  Roy.  Inst.,  12-133. 

Phil.  Trans.,  112-237: 

Report  from  the  Cape  Town  Observatory:  a  whitish  spot  on  the 
dark  part  of  the  moon's  limb.  Three  smaller  lights  were  seen. 

The  call  of  positiveness,  in  its  aspects  of  singleness,  or  homo- 
geneity, or  oneness,  or  completeness.  In  data  now  coming,  I  feel 
it  myself.  A  Leverrier  studies  more  than  twenty  observations.  The 
inclination  is  irresistible  to  think  that  they  all  relate  to  one  phe- 
nomenon. It  is  an  expression  of  cosmic  inclination.  Most  of  the 
observations  are  so  irreconcilable  with  any  acceptance  other  than 
of  orbitless,  dirigible  worlds  that  he  shuts  his  eyes  to  more  than 
two- thirds  of  them;  he  picks  out  six  that  can  give  him  the  illusion 
of  completeness,  or  of  all  relating  to  one  planet. 

Or  let  it  be  that  we  have  data  of  many  dark  bodies — still  do  we 
incline  almost  irresistibly  to  think  of  one  of  them  as  the  dark-body- 
in-chief.  Dark  bodies,  floating,  or  navigating,  in  inter-planetary 
space — and  I  conceive  of  one  that's  the  Prince  of  Dark  Bodies: 

Melanicus. 

Vast  dark  thing  with  the  wings  of  a  super-bat,  or  jet-black  super- 
construction;  most  likely  one  of  the  spores  of  the  Evil  One. 

The  extraordinary  year,  1883: 

London  Times,  Dec.  17,  1883: 

Extract  from  a  letter  by  Hicks  Pashaw:  that,  in  Egypt,  Sept.  24, 
1883,  he  had  seen,  through  glasses,  "an  immense  black  spot  upon 
the  lower  part  of  the  sun." 

Sun  spot,  may  be. 

One  night  an  astronomer  was  looking  up  at  the  sky,  when  some- 
thing obscured  a  star,  for  three  and  a  half  seconds.  A  meteor  had 
been  seen  nearby,  but  its  train  had  been  only  momentarily  visible. 
Dr.  Wolf  was  the  astronomer  (Nature,  86-528). 

The  next  datum  is  one  of  the  most  sensational  we  have,  except 


200  BOOK  OF  JHE  DAMNED 

that  there  is  very  little  to  it.  A  dark  object  that  was  seen  by 
Prof.  Heis,  for  eleven  degrees  of  arc,  moving  slowly  across  the  Milky 
Way.  (Greg's  Catalogue,  Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1867-426.) 

One  of  our  quasi-reasons  for  accepting  that  orbitless  worlds  are 
dirigible  is  the  almost  complete  absence  of  data  of  collisions:  of 
course,  though  in  defiance  of  gravitation,  they  may,  without  direc- 
tion like  human  direction,  adjust  to  one  another  in  the  way  of 
vortex  rings  of  smoke — a  very  human-like  way  that  is.  But  in 
Knowledge,  Feb.,  1894,  are  two  photographs  of  Brooks'  comet 
that  are  shown  as  evidence  of  its  seeming  collision  with  a  dark 
object,  Oct.,  1893.  Our  own  wording  is  that  it  "struck  against 
something":  Prof.  Barnard's  is  that  it  had  "entered  some  dense 
medium,  which  shattered  it."  For  all  I  know  it  had  knocked 
against  merely  a  field  of  ice. 

Melanicus. 

That  upon  the  wings  of  a  super-bat,  he  broods  over  this  earth 
and  over  other  worlds,  perhaps  deriving  something  from  them: 
hovers  on  wings,  or  wing-like  appendages,  or  planes  that  are  hun- 
dreds of  miles  from  tip  to  tip — a  super-evil  thing  that  is  exploiting 
us.  By  Evil  I  mean  that  which  makes  us  useful. 

He  obscures  a  star.  He  shoves  a  comet.  I  think  he's  a  vast, 
black,  brooding  vampire. 

Science,  July  31,  1896: 

That,  according  to  a  newspaper  account,  Mr.  W.  R.  Brooks, 
director  of  the  Smith  Observatory,  had  seen  a  dark  round  object 
pass  rather  slowly  across  the  moon,  in  a  horizontal  direction.  In 
Mr.  Brooks'  opinion  it  was  a  dark  meteor.  In  Science,  Sept.  14, 
1896,  a  correspondent  writes  that,  in  his  opinion,  it  may  have  been 
a  bird.  We  shall  have  no  trouble  with  the  meteor  and  bird  mergers, 
if  we  have  observations  of  long  duration  and  estimates  of  size  up 
to  hundreds  of  miles.  As  to  the  body  that  was  seen  by  Brooks, 
there  is  a  note  from  the  Dutch  astronomer,  Muller,  in  the  Scientific 
American,  75-251,  that,  upon  April  4,  1892,  he  had  seen  a  similar 
phenomenon.  In  Science  Gossip,  n.  s.,  3-135,  are  more  details  of 
the  Brooks  object — apparent  diameter  about  one-thirtieth  of  the 
moon's — moon's  disk  crossed  in  three  or  four  seconds.  The  writer, 
in  Science  Gossip,  says  that,  on  June  27,  1896,  at  one  o'clock  in  the 
morning,  he  was  looking  at  the  moon  with  a  2 -inch  achromatic, 
power  44,  when  a  long  black  object  sailed  past,  from  west  to  east, 
the  transit  occupying  3  or  4  seconds.  He  believed  this  object  to  be 
a  bird — there  was,  however,  no  fluttering  motion  observable  in  it. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  201 

In  the  Astronomische  Nachrichten,  No.  3477,  Dr.  Brendel,  of 
Griefswald,  Pomerania,  writes  that  Postmaster  Ziegler  and  other 
observers  had  seen  a  body  about  6  feet  in  diameter  crossing  the 
sun's  disk.  The  duration  here  indicates  something  far  from  the 
earth,  and  also  far  from  the  sun.  This  thing  was  seen  a  quarter  of 
an  hour  before  it  reached  the  sun.  Time  in  crossing  the  sun  was 
about  an  hour.  After  leaving  the  sun  it  was  visible  an  hour. 

I  think  he's  a  vast,  black  vampire  that  sometimes  broods  over 
this  earth  and  other  bodies. 

Communication  from  Dr.  F.  B.  Harris  (Popular  Astronomy,  20- 

398): 

That,  upon  the  evening  of  January  27,  1912,  Dr.  Harris  saw, 
upon  the  moon,  "an  intensely  black  object."  He  estimated  it  to 
be  2  50  miles  long  and  50  miles  wide.  "The  object  resembled  a  crow 
poised,  as  near  as  anything."  Clouds  then  cut  off  observation. 

Dr.  Harris  writes: 

"I  cannot  but  think  that  a  very  interesting  and  curious  phenome- 
non happened." 


. 


CHAPTER    XV 

SHORT  chapter  coming  now,  and  it's  the  worst  of  them  all.  I 
think  it's  speculative.  It's  a  lapse  from  our  usual  pseudo- 
standards.  I  think  it  must  mean  that  the  preceding  chapter  was 
very  efficiently  done,  and  that  now  by  the  rhythm  of  all  quasi- 
things — which  can't  be  real  things,  if  they're  rhythms,  because  a 
rhythm  is  an  appearance  that  turns  into  its  own  opposite  and  then 
back  again — but  now,  to  pay  up,  we're  what  we  weren't.  Short 
chapter,  and  I  think  we'll  fill  in  with  several  points  in  Interme- 
diatism. 

A  puzzle: 

If  it  is  our  acceptance  that,  out  of  the  Negative  Absolute,  the 
Positive  Absolute  is  generating  itself,  recruiting,  or  maintaining, 
itself,  via  a  third  state,  or  our  own  quasi-state,  it  would  seem  that 
we're  trying  to  conceive  of  Universalness  manufacturing  more  Uni- 
versalness  from  Nothingness.  Take  that  up  yourself,  if  you're 
willing  to  run  the  risk  of  disappearing  with  such  velocity  that 
you'll  leave  an  incandescent  train  behind,  and  risk  being  infinitely 
happy  forever,  whereas  you  probably  don't  want  to  be  happy — • 
I'll  sidestep  that  myself,  and  try  to  be  intelligible  by  regarding  the 
Positive  Absolute  from  the  aspect  of  Realness  instead  of  Universal- 
ness,  recalling  that  by  both  Realness  and  Universalness  we  mean 
the  same  state,  or  that  which  does  not  merge  away  into  something 
else,  because  there  is  nothing  else.  So  the  idea  is  that  out  of 
Unrealness,  instead  of  Nothingness,  Realness,  instead  of  Universal- 
ness,  is,  via  our  own  quasi-state,  manufacturing  more  Realness. 
Just  so,  but  in  relative  terms,  of  course,  all  imaginings  that  mate- 
rialize into  machines  or  statues,  buildings,  dollars,  paintings  or 
books  in  paper  and  ink  are  graduations  from  unrealness  to  realness — • 
in  relative  terms.  It  would  seem  then  that  Intermediateness  is  a 
relation  between  the  Positive  Absolute  and  the  Negative  Absolute. 
But  the  absolute  cannot  be  the  related — of  course  a  confession 
that  we  can't  really  think  of  it  at  all,  if  here  we  think  of  a  limit  to 
the  unlimited.  Doing  the  best  we  can,  and  encouraged  by  the  reflec- 
tion that  we  can't  do  worse  than  has  been  done  by  metaphysicians 

202 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  203 

in  the  past,  we  accept  that  the  absolute  can't  be  the  related.  So 
then  that  our  quasi-state  is  not  a  real  relation,  if  nothing  in  it  is 
real.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  an  unreal  relation,  if  nothing  in 
it  is  unreal.  It  seems  thinkable  that  the  Positive  Absolute  can,  by 
means  of  Intermediateness,  have  a  quasi-relation,  or  be  only  quasi- 
related,  or  be  the  unrelated,  in  final  terms,  or,  at  least,  not  be  the 
related,  in  final  terms. 

As  to  free  will  and  Intermediatism — same  answer  as  to  everything 
else.  By  free  will  we  mean  Independence — or  that  which  does  not 
merge  away  into  something  else — so,  in  Intermediateness,  neither 
free-will  nor  slave-will — but  a  different  approximation  for  every 
so-called  person  toward  one  or  the  other  of  the  extremes.  The 
hackneyed  way  of  expressing  this  seems  to  me  to  be  the  acceptable 
way,  if  in  Intermediateness,  there  is  only  the  paradoxical :  that  we're 
free  to  do  what  we  have  to  do. 

I  am  not  convinced  that  we  make  a  fetich  of  the  preposterous. 
I  think  our  feeling  is  that  in  first  gropings  there's  no  knowing  what 
will  afterward  be  the  acceptable.  I  think  that  if  an  early  biologist 
heard  of  birds  that  grow  on  trees,  he  should  record  that  he  had 
heard  of  birds  that  grow  on  trees:  then  let  sorting  over  of  data 
occur  afterward.  The  one  thing  that  we  try  to  tone  down,  but 
that  is  to  a  great  degree  unavoidable  is  having  our  data  all  mixed 
up  like  Long  Island  and  Florida  in  the  minds  of  early  American 
explorers.  My  own  notion  is  that  this  whole  book  is  very  much  like 
a  map  of  North  America  in  which  the  Hudson  River  is  set  down 
as  a  passage  leading  to  Siberia.  We  think  of  Monstrator  and  Melan- 
icus  and  of  a  world  that  is  now  in  communication  with  this  earth: 
if  so,  secretly,  with  certain  esoteric  ones  upon  this  earth.  Whether 
that  world's  Monstrator  and  Monstrator's  Melanicus — must  be 
the  subject  of  later  inquiry.  It  would  be  a  gross  thing  to  do: 
solve  up  everything  now  and  leave  nothing  to  our  disciples. 

I  have  been  very  much  struck  with  phenomena  of  "cup  marks." 

They  look  to  me  like  symbols  of  communication. 

But  they  do  not  look  to  me  like  means  of  communication  be- 
tween some  of  the  inhabitants  of  this  earth  and  other  inhabitants 
of  this  earth. 

My  own  impression  is  that  some  external  force  has  marked,  with 
symbols,  rocks  of  this  earth,  from  far  away. 

I  do  not  think  that  cup  marks  are  inscribed  communications 
among  different  inhabitants  of  this  earth,  because  it  seems  too 


204  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

unacceptable  that  inhabitants  of  China,  Scotland,  and  America 
should  all  have  conceived  of  the  same  system. 

Cup  marks  are  strings  of  cup-like  impressions  in  rocks.  Some- 
times there  are  rings  around  them,  and  sometimes  they  have  only 
semi-circles.  Great  Britain,  America,  France,  Algeria,  Circassia, 
Palestine:  they're  virtually  everywhere — except  in  the  far  north,  I 
think.  In  China,  cliffs  are  dotted  with  them.  Upon  a  cliff,  near 
Lake  Como,  there  is  a  maze  of  these  markings.  In  Italy  and  Spain 
and  India  they  occur  in  enormous  numbers. 

Given  that  a  force,  say  like  electric  force,  could,  from  a  distance, 
mark  such  a  substance  as  rocks,  as,  from  a  distance  of  hundreds 
of  miles,  selenium  can  be  marked  by  telephotographers — but  I  am 
of  two  minds 

The  Lost  Explorers  from  Somewhere,  and  an  attempt,  from 
Somewhere,  to  communicate  with  them:  so  a  frenzy  of  showering 
of  messages  toward  this  earth,  in  the  hope  that  some  of  them 
would  mark  rocks  near  the  lost  explorers 

Or  that  somewhere  upon  this  earth,  there  is  an  especial  rocky 
surface,  or  receptor,  or  polar  construction,  or  a  steep,  conical  hill, 
upon  which  for  ages  have  been  received  messages  from  some  other 
world;  but  that  at  times  messages  go  astray  and  mark  substances 
perhaps  thousands  of  miles  from  the  receptor; 

That  perhaps  forces  behind  the  history  of  this  earth  have  left 
upon  the  rocks  of  Palestine  and  England  and  India  and  China 
records  that  may  some  day  be  deciphered,  of  their  misdirected 
instructions  to  certain  esoteric  ones — Order  of  the  Freemasons — 
the  Jesuits 

I  emphasize  the  row-formation  of  cup  marks: 

Prof.  Douglas  (Saturday  Review,  Nov.  24,  1883): 

"Whatever  may  have  been  their  motive,  the  cup-markers  showed 
a  decided  liking  for  arranging  their  sculpturings  in  regularly  spaced 
rows." 

That  cup  marks  are  an  archaic  form  of  inscription  was  first 
suggested  by  Canon  Greenwell  many  years  ago.  But  more  specifically 
adumbratory  to  our  own  expression  are  the  observations  of  Rivett- 
Carnac  (Jour.  Roy.  Asiatic  Soc.,  1903-515): 

That  the  Braille  system  of  raised  dots  is  an  inverted  arrange- 
ment of  cup  marks:  also  that  there  are  strong  resemblances  to 
the  Morse  code.  But  no  tame  and  systematized  archaeologist  can 
do  more  than  casually  point  out  resemblances,  and  merely  suggest 
that  strings  of  cup  marks  look  like  messages,  because — China, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  205 

Switzerland,  Algeria,  America — if  messages  they  be,  there  seems  to 
be  no  escape  from  attributing  one  origin  to  them — then,  if  messages 
they  be,  I  accept  one  external  origin,  to  which  the  whole  surface 
of  this  earth  was  accessible,  for  them. 

Something  else  that  we  emphasize: 

That  rows  of  cup  marks  have  often  been  likened  to  foot  prints. 

But,  in  this  similitude,  their  uni-linear  arrangement  must  be 
disregarded — of  course  often  they're  mixed  up  in  every  way,  but 
arrangement  in  single  lines  is  very  common.  It  is  odd  that  they 
should  so  often  be  likened  to  footprints:  I  suppose  there  are  excep- 
tional cases,  but  unless  it's  something  that  hops  on  one  foot,  or  a 
cat  going  along  a  narrow  fence-top,  I  don't  think  of  anything  that 
makes  footprints  one  directly  ahead  of  another — Cop,  in  a  station 
house,  walking  a  chalk  line,  perhaps. 

Upon  the  Witch's  Stone,  near  Ratho,  Scotland,  there  are  twenty- 
four  cups,  varying  in  size  from  one  and  a  half  to  three  inches  in 
diameter,  arranged  in  approximately  straight  lines.  Locally  it  is 
explained  that  these  are  tracks  of  dogs'  feet  (Proc.  Soc.  Antiq. 
Scotland,  2-4-79).  Similar  marks  are  scattered  bewilderingly  all 
around  the  Witch's  Stone — like  a  frenzy  of  telegraphing,  or  like 
messages  repeating  and  repeating,  trying  to  localize  differently. 

In  Inverness-shire,  cup  marks  are  called  "fairies'  footmarks."  At 
Valna's  church,  Norway,  and  St.  Peter's,  Ambleteuse,  there  are 
such  marks,  said  to  be  horses'  hoofprints.  The  rocks  of  Clare, 
Ireland,  are  marked  with  prints  supposed  to  have  been  made  by  a 
mythical  cow  ("Folklore,"  21-184). 

We  now  have  such  a  ghost  of  a  thing  that  I'd  not  like  to  be 
interpreted  as  offering  it  as  a  datum:  it  simply  illustrates  what  I 
mean  by  the  notion  of  symbols,  like  cups,  or  like  footprints,  which, 
if  like  those  of  horses  or  cows,  are  the  reverse  of,  or  the  negatives  of, 
cups — of  symbols  that  are  regularly  received  somewhere  upon  this 
earth — steep,  conical  hill,  somewhere,  I  think — but  that  have  often 
alighted  in  wrong  places — considerably  to  the  mystification  of  per- 
sons waking  up  some  morning  to  find  them  upon  formerly  blank 
spaces. 

An  ancient  record — still  worse,  an  ancient  Chinese  record — of  a 
courtyard  of  a  palace — dwellers  of  the  palace  waking  up  one 
morning,  finding  the  courtyard  marked  with  tracks  like  the  foot- 
prints of  an  ox — supposed  that  the  devil  did  it.  (Notes  and 
Queries,  9-6-225.) 


CHAPTER  XVI 

ANGELS. 
Hordes  upon  hordes  of  them. 

Beings  massed  like  the  clouds  of  souls,  or  the  commingling 
whiffs  of  spirituality,  or  the  exhalations  of  souls  that  Dore  pic- 
tured so  often. 

It  may  be  that  the  Milky  Way  is  a  composition  of  stiff,  frozen, 
finally-static,  absolute  angels.  We  shall  have  data  of  little  Milky 
Ways,  moving  swiftly;  or  data  of  hosts  of  angels,  not  absolute,  or 
still  dynamic.  I  suspect,  myself,  that  the  fixed  stars  are  really 
fixed,  and  that  the  minute  motions  said  to  have  been  detected  in 
them  are  illusions.  I  think  that  the  fixed  stars  are  absolutes.  Their 
twinkling  is  only  the  interpretation  by  an  intermediatist  state  of 
them.  I  think  that  soon  after  Leverrier  died,  a  new  fixed  star  was 
discovered — that,  if  Dr.  Gray  had  stuck  to  his  story  of  the  thou- 
sands of  fishes  from  one  pail  of  water,  had  written  upon  it,  lectured 
upon  it,  taken  to  street  corners,  to  convince  the  world  that,  whether 
conceivable  or  not,  his  explanation  was  the  only  true  explanation: 
had  thought  of  nothing  but  this  last  thing  at  night  and  first  thing 
in  the  morning — his  obituary — another  "nova"  reported  in 
Monthly  Notices. 

I  think  that  Milky  Ways,  of  an  inferior,  or  dynamic,  order,  have 
often  been  seen  by  astronomers.  Of  course  it  may  be  that  the 
phenomena  that  we  shall  now  consider  are  not  angels  at  all.  We 
are  simply  feeling  around,  trying  to  find  out  what  we  can  accept. 
Some  of  our  data  indicate  hosts  of  rotund  and  complacent  tourists 
in  inter-planetary  space — but  then  data  of  long,  lean,  hungry  ones. 
I  think  that  there  are,  out  in  inter-planetary  space  Super  Tamer- 
lanes,  at  the  head  of  hosts  of  celestial  ravagers — which  have  come 
here  and  pounced  upon  civilizations  of  the  past,  cleaning  them  up 
all  but  their  bones,  or  temples  and  monuments — for  which  later 
historians  have  invented  exclusionist  histories.  But  if  something 
now  has  a  legal  right  to  us,  and  can  enforce  its  proprietorship, 
they've  been  warned  off.  It's  the  way  of  all  exploitation.  I  should 
say  that  we're  now  under  cultivation:  that  we're  conscious  of  it, 

206 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  207 

but  have  the  impertinence  to  attribute  it  all  to  our  own  nobler 
and  higher  instincts. 

Against  these  notions  is  the  same  sense  of  finality  that  opposes 
all  advance.  It's  why  we  rate  acceptance  as  a  better  adaptation 
than  belief.  Opposing  us  is  the  strong  belief  that,  as  to  inter- 
planetary phenomena,  virtually  everything  has  been  found  out. 
Sense  of  finality  and  illusion  of  homogeneity.  But  that  what  is 
called  advancing  knowledge  is  violation  of  the  sense  of  blankness. 

A  drop  of  water.  Once  upon  a  time  water  was  considered  so 
homogeneous  that  it  was  thought  of  as  an  element.  The  microscope 
—and  not  only  that  the  supposititiously  elementary  was  seen  to  be 
of  infinite  diversity,  but  that  in  its  protoplasmic  life  there  were 
new  orders  of  beings. 

Or  the  year  1491 — and  a  European  looking  westward  over  the 
ocean — his  feeling  that  that  suave  western  droop  was  unbreakable; 
that  gods  of  regularity  would  not  permit  that  smooth  horizon  to  be 
disturbed  by  coasts  or  spotted  with  islands.  The  unpleasantness 
of  even  contemplating  such  a  state — wide,  smooth  west,  so  clean 
against  the  sky — spotted  with  islands — geographic  leprosy. 

But  coasts  and  islands  and  Indians  and  bison,  in  the  seemingly 
vacant  west:  lakes,  mountains,  rivers 

One  looks  up  at  the  sky:  the  relative  homogeneity  of  the  rela- 
tively unexplored:  one  thinks  of  only  a  few  kinds  of  phenomena. 
But  the  acceptance  is  forced  upon  me  that  there  are  modes  and 
modes  and  modes  of  inter-planetary  existence:  things  as  different 
from  planets  and  comets  and  meteors  as  Indians  are  from  bison 
and  prairie  dogs:  a  super-geography — or  celestiography — of  vast 
stagnant  regions,  but  also  of  Super-Niagaras  and  Ultra-Mississippis: 
and  a  super-sociology — voyagers  and  tourists  and  ravagers:  the 
hunted  and  the  hunting:  the  super-mercantile,  the  super-piratic, 
the  super-evangelical. 

Sense  of  homogeneity,  or  our  positivist  illusion  of  the  unknown 
— and  the  fate  of  all  positivism. 

Astronomy  and  the  academic. 

Ethics  and  the  abstract. 

The  universal  attempt  to  formulate  or  to  regularize — an  attempt 
that  can  be  made  only  by  disregarding  or  denying. 

Or  all  things  disregard  or  deny  that  which  will  eventually  invade 
and  destroy  them 

Until  comes  the  day  when  some  one  thing  shall  say,  and  enforce 
upon  Infinitude: 


208  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

"Thus  far  shalt  thou  go:  here  is  absolute  demarcation." 

The  final  utterance: 

"There  is  only  I." 

In  the  Monthly  Notices  of  the  R.  A.  S.,  11-48,  there  is  a  letter 
from  the  Rev.  W.  Read: 

That,  upon  the  4th  of  September,  1851,  at  9.30  a.  m.,  he  had 
seen  a  host  of  self-luminous  bodies,  passing  the  field  of  his  telescope, 
some  slowly  and  some  rapidly.  They  appeared  to  occupy  a  zone 
several  degrees  in  breadth.  The  direction  of  most  of  them  was 
due  east  to  west,  but  some  moved  from  north  to  south.  The  num- 
bers were  tremendous.  They  were  observed  for  six  hours. 

Editor's  note: 

"May  not  these  appearances  be  attributed  to  an  abnormal  state 
of  the  optic  nerves  of  the  observer?" 

In  Monthly  Notices,  12-38,  Mr.  Read  answers  that  he  had  been 
a  diligent  observer,  with  instruments  of  a  superior  order,  for  about 
28  years — "but  I  have  never  witnessed  such  an  appearance  before." 
As  to  illusion  he  says  that  two  other  members  of  his  family  had 
seen  the  objects. 

The  Editor  withdraws  his  suggestion. 

We  know  what  to  expect.  Almost  absolutely — in  an  existence 
that  is  essentially  Hibernian — we  can  predict  the  past — that  is, 
look  over  something  of  this  kind,  written  in  1851,  and  know  what 
to  expect  from  the  Exclusionists  later.  If  Mr.  Read  saw  a  mi- 
gration of  dissatisfied  angels,  numbering  millions,  they  must  merge 
away,  at  least  subjectively,  with  commonplace  terrestrial  phenom- 
ena— of  course  disregarding  Mr.  Read's  probable  familiarity,  of  28 
years'  duration,  with  the  commonplaces  of  terrestrial  phenomena. 

Monthly  Notices,  12-183: 

Letter  from  Rev.  W.  R.  Dawes: 

That  he  had  seen  similar  objects — and  in  the  month  of  September 
—that  they  were  nothing  but  seeds  floating  in  the  air. 

In  the  Report  of  the  British  Association,  1852-235,  there  is  a 
communication  from  Mr.  Read  to  Prof.  Baden-Powell: 

That  the  objects  that  had  been  seen  by  him  and  by  Mr.  Dawes 
were  not  similar.  He  denies  that  he  had  seen  seeds  floating  in  the 
air.  There  had  been  little  wind,  and  that  had  come  from  the  sea, 
where  seeds  would  not  be  likely  to  have  origin.  The  objects  that 
he  had  seen  were  round  and  sharply  defined,  and  with  none  of  the 
feathery  appearance  of  thistle  down.  He  then  quotes  from  a  letter 
from  C.  B.  Chalmers,  F.  R.  A.  S.,  who  had  seen  a  similar  stream, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  209 

a  procession,  or  migration,  except  that  some  of  the  bodies  were 
more  elongated — or  lean  and  hungry — than  globular. 

He  might  have  argued  for  sixty-five  years.  He'd  have  impressed 
nobody — of  importance.  The  super-motif,  or  dominant,  of  his  era, 
was  Exclusionism,  and  the  notion  of  seeds  in  the  air  assimilates — 
with  due  disregards — with  that  dominant. 

Or  pageantries  here  upon  our  earth,  and  things  looking  down 
upon  us — and  the  Crusades  were  only  dust  clouds,  and  glints  of 
the  sun  on  shining  armor  were  only  particles  of  mica  in  dust  clouds. 
I  think  it  was  a  Crusade  that  Read  saw — but  that  it  was  right, 
relatively  to  the  year  1851,  to  say  that  it  was  only  seeds  in  the 
wind,  whether  the  wind  blew  from  the  sea  or  not.  I  think  of 
things  that  were  luminous  with  religious  zeal,  mixed  up,  like  every- 
thing else  in  Intermediateness,  with  black  marauders  and  from 
gray  to  brown  beings  of  little  personal  ambitions.  There  may  have 
been  a  Richard  Coeur  de  Lion,  on  his  way  to  right  wrongs  in 
Jupiter.  It  was  right,  relatively  to  1851,  to  say  that  he  was  a  seed 
of  a  cabbage. 

Prof.  Coffin,  U.  S.  N.  (Jour.  Frank.  Inst.,  88-151): 

That,  during  the  eclipse  of  Aug.,  1869,  he  had  noted  the  passage, 
across  his  telescope,  of  several  bright  flakes  resembling  thistle- 
blows,  floating  in  the  sunlight.  But  the  telescope  was  so  focussed 
that,  if  these  things  were  distinct,  they  must  have  been  so  far  away 
from  this  earth  that  the  difficulties  of  orthodoxy  remain  as  great, 
one  way  or  another,  no  matter  what  we  think  they  were 

They  were  "well-defined,"  says  Prof.  Coffin. 

Henry  Waldner  (Nature,  5-304) : 

That,  April  27,  1863,  he  had  seen  great  numbers  of  small,  shining 
bodies  passing  from  west  to  east.  He  had  notified  Dr.  Wolf,  of  the 
Observatory  of  Zurich,  who  "had  convinced  himself  of  this  strange 
phenomenon."  Dr.  Wolf  had  told  him  that  similar  bodies  had 
been  seen  by  Sig.  Capocci,  of  the  Capodimonte  Observatory,  at 
Naples,  May  n,  1845. 

The  shapes  were  of  great  diversity — or  different  aspects  of  sim- 
ilar shapes? 

Appendages  were  seen  upon  some  of  them. 

We  are  told  that  some  were  star-shaped,  with  transparent  ap- 
pendages. 

I  think,  myself,  it  was  a  Mohammed  and  his  Hegira.  May  have 
been  only  his  harem.  Astonishing  sensation:  afloat  in  space  with 
£en  millon  wives  around  one.  Anyway,  it  would  seem  that  we 


210  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

have  considerable  advantage  here,  inasmuch  as  seeds  are  not  in 
season  in  April — but  the  pulling  back  to  earth,  the  bedraggling  by 
those  sincere  but  dull  ones  of  some  time  ago.  ,We  have  the  same 
stupidity — necessary,  functioning  stupidity — of  attribution  of  some- 
thing that  was  so  rare  that  an  astronomer  notes  only  one  instance 
between  1845  and  1863,  to  an  everyday  occurrence 

Or  Mr.  Waldner's  assimilative  opinion  that  he  had  seen  only  ice 
crystals. 

Whether  they  were  not  very  exclusive  veils  of  a  super-harem,  or 
planes  of  a  very  light  material,  we  have  an  impression  of  star-shaped 
things  with  transparent  appendages  that  have  been  seen  in  the 
sky. 

Hosts  of  small  bodies — black,  this  time — that  were  seen  by  the 
astronomers  Herrick,  Buys-Ballot,  and  De  Cuppis  (V Annie  Scien- 
tifique,  1860-25);  vast  number  of  bodies  that  were  seen  by  M. 
Lamey,  to  cross  the  moon  (L'Annee  Scientifique,  1874-62);  another 
instance  of  dark  ones;  prodigious  number  of  dark,  spherical  bodies 
reported  by  Messier,  June  17,  1777  (Arago,  (Euvres,  9-38);  consid- 
erable number  of  luminous  bodies  which  appeared  to  move  out 
from  the  sun,  in  diverse  directions;  seen  at  Havana,  during  eclipse 
of  the  sun,  May  15,  1836,  by  Prof.  Auber  (Poey);  M.  Poey  cites 
a  similar  instance,  of  Aug.  3,  1886;  M.  Lotard's  opinion  that  they 
were  birds  (U Astronomic,  1886-391);  large  number  of  small 
bodies  crossing  disk  of  the  sun,  some  swiftly,  some  slowly;  most 
of  them  globular,  but  some  seemingly  triangular,  and  some  of  more 
complicated  structure;  seen  by  M.  Trouvelet,  who,  whether  seeds, 
insects,  birds,  or  other  commonplace  things,  had  never  seen  any- 
thing resembling  these  forms  (LAnnee  Scientifique,  1885-8);  report 
from  the  Rio  de  Janeiro  Observatory,  of  vast  numbers  of  bodies 
crossing  the  sun,  some  of  them  luminous  and  some  of  them  dark, 
from  some  time  in  December,  1875,  until  Jan-  22>  *876  (La  Nature, 
1876-384). 

Of  course,  at  a  distance,  any  form  is  likely  to  look  round  or 
roundish:  but  we  point  out  that  we  have  notes  upon  the  seeming 
of  more  complex  forms.  In  L'Astronomie,  1886-70,  is  recorded  M. 
Briguiere's  observation,  at  Marseilles,  April  15  and  April  25,  1883, 
upon  the  crossing  of  the  sun  by  bodies  that  were  irregular  in  form. 
Some  of  them  moved  as  if  in  alignment. 

Letter  from  Sir  Robert  Inglis  to  Col.  Sabine  (Rept.  Brit.  Assoc., 

1849-17): 
That,  at  3  p.  m.,  Aug.  8,  1849,  a*  Gais,  Switzerland,  Inglis  had 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  211 

seen  thousands  and  thousands  of  brilliant  white  objects,  like  snow- 
flakes  in  a  cloudless  sky.  Though  this  display  lasted  about  twenty- 
five  minutes,  not  one  of  these  seeming  snowflakes  was  seen  to  fall. 
Inglis  says  that  his  servant  "fancied"  that  he  had  seen  something 
like  wings  on  these — whatever  they  were.  Upon  page  18,  of  the 
Report,  Sir  John  Herschel  says  that,  in  1845  or  1846,  his  atten- 
tion had  been  attracted  by  objects  of  considerable  size,  in  the  air, 
seemingly  not  far  away.  He  had  looked  at  them  through  a  tele- 
scope. He  says  that  they  were  masses  of  hay,  not  less  than  a 
yard  or  two  in  diameter.  Still  there  are  some  circumstances  that 
interest  me.  He  says  that,  though  no  less  than  a  whirlwind  could 
have  sustained  these  masses,  the  air  about  him  was  calm.  "No 
doubt  wind  prevailed  at  the  spot,  but  there  was  no  roaring  noise." 
None  of  these  masses  fell  within  his  observation  or  knowledge.  To 
walk  a  few  fields  away  and  find  out  more  would  seem  not  much 
to  expect  from  a  man  of  science,  but  it  is  one  of  our  superstitions, 
that  such  a  seeming  trifle  is  just  what — by  the  Spirit  of  an  Era, 
we'll  call  it — one  is  not  permitted  to  do.  If  those  things  were  not 
masses  of  hay,  and  if  Herschel  had  walked  a  little  and  found  out, 
and  had  reported  that  he  had  seen  strange  objects  in  the  air — that 
report,  in  1846,  would  have  been  as  misplaced  as  the  appearance  of 
a  tail  upon  an  embryo  still  in  its  gastrula  era.  I  have  noticed  this 
inhibition  in  my  own  case  many  times.  Looking  back — why  didn't 
I  do  this  or  that  little  thing  that  would  have  cost  so  little  and  have 
meant  so  much?  Didn't  belong  to  that  era  of  my  own  develop- 
ment. 

Nature,  22-64: 

That,  at  Kattenau,  Germany,  about  half  an  hour  before  sunrise, 
March  22,  1880,  "an  enormous  number  of  luminous  bodies  rose 
from  the  horizon,  and  passed  in  a  horizontal  direction  from  east  to 
west."  They  are  described  as  having  appeared  in  a  zone  or  belt. 
"They  shone  with  a  remarkably  brilliant  light." 

So  they've  thrown  lassos  over  our  data  to  bring  them  back  to 
earth.  But  they're  lassos  that  cannot  tighten.  We  can't  pull  out 
of  them:  we  may  step  out  of  them,  or  lift  them  off.  Some  of  us  used 
to  have  an  impression  of  Science  sitting  in  calm,  just  judgment: 
some  of  us  now  feel  that  a  good  many  of  our  data  have  been 
lynched.  If  a  Crusade,  perhaps  from  Mars  to  Jupiter,  occur  in  the 
autumn — "seeds."  If  a  Crusade  or  outpouring  of  celestial  vandals 
is  seen  from  this  earth  in  the  spring — "ice  crystals."  If  we  have 


212  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

record  of  a  race  of  aerial  beings,  perhaps  with  no  substantial  habitat, 
seen  by  some  one  in  India — "locusts." 

This  will  be  disregarded: 

If  locusts  fly  high,  they  freeze  and  fall  in  thousands. 

Nature,  47-581: 

Locusts  that  were  seen  in  the  mountains  of  India,  at  a  height 
of  12,750  feet — "in  swarms  and  dying  by  tnousands." 

But  no  matter  whether  they  fly  high  or  fly  low,  no  one  ever 
wonders  what's  in  the  air  when  locusts  are  passing  overhead,  because 
of  the  failing  of  stragglers.  I  have  especially  looked  this  matter 
up— no  mystery  when  locusts  are  flying  overhead — constant  falling 
of  stragglers. 

Monthly  Notices,  30-135: 

"An  unusual  phenomenon  noticed  by  Lieut.  Herschel,  Oct.  17 
and  1 8,  1870,  while  observing  the  sun,  at  Bangalore,  India." 

Lieut.  Herschel  had  noticed  dark  shadows  crossing  the  sun — but 
away  from  the  sun  there  were  luminous,  moving  images.  For  two 
days  bodies  passed  in  a  continuous  stream,  varying  in  size  and 
velocity. 

The  Lieutenant  tries  to  explain,  as  we  shall  see,  but  he  says: 

"As  it  was,  the  continuous  flight,  for  two  whole  days,  in  such 
numbers,  in  the  upper  regions  of  the  air,  of  beasts  that  left  no 
stragglers,  is  a  wonder  of  natural  history,  if  not  of  astronomy." 

He  tried  different  focussing — he  saw  wings — perhaps  he  saw 
planes.  He  says  that  he  saw  upon  the  objects  either  wings  or 
phantom-like  appendages. 

Then  he  saw  something  that  was  so  bizarre  that,  in  the  fullness 
of  his  nineteenth-centuriness,  he  writes: 

"There  was  no  longer  doubt:  they  were  locusts  or  flies  of  some 
sort." 

One  of  them  had  paused. 

It  had  hovered. 

Then  it  had  whisked  off. 

The  Editor  says  that  at  that  time  "countless  locusts  had  de- 
scended upon  certain  parts  of  India." 

We  now  have  an  instance  that  is  extraordinary  in  several  re- 
spects— super- voyagers  or  super-ravagers ;  angels,  ragamuffins,  cru- 
saders, emigrants,  aeronauts,  or  aerial  elephants,  or  bison  or  dino- 
saurs— except  that  I  think  the  thing  had  planes  or  wings — one  of 
them  has  been  photographed.  It  may  be  that  in  the  history  of 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  213 

photography  no  more  extraordinary  picture  than  this  has  ever  been 
taken. 

L'Astrcnomie,  1885-347: 

That,  at  the  Observatory  of  Zacatecas,  Mexico,  Aug.  12,  1883, 
about  2,500  meters  above  sea  level,  were  seen  a  large  number  of 
small  luminous  bodies,  entering  upon  the  disk  of  the  sun.  M. 
Bonilla  telegraphed  to  the  Observatories  of  the  City  of  Mexico  and 
of  Puebla.  Word  came  back  that  the  bodies  were  not  visible  there. 
Because  of  this  parallax,  M.  Bonilla  placed  the  bodies  "relatively 
near  the  earth."  But  when  we  find  out  what  he  called  "relatively 
near  the  earth" — birds  or  bugs  or  hosts  of  a  Super-Tamerlane  or 
army  of  a  celestial  Richard  Coeur  de  Lion — our  heresies  rejoice 
anyway.  His  estimate  is  "less  distance  than  the  moon." 

One  of  them  was  photographed.  See  L 'Astronomic,  1885-349. 
The  photograph  shows  a  long  body  surrounded  by  indefinite  struc- 
tures, or  by  the  haze  of  wings  or  planes  in  motion. 

L' Astronomic,  1887-66: 

Signer  Ricco,  of  the  Observatory  of  Palermo,  writes  that,  Nov. 
30,  1880,  at  8.30  o'clock  in  the  morning,  he  was  watching  the  sun, 
when  he  saw,  slowly  traversing  its  disk,  bodies  in  two  long,  par- 
allel lines,  and  a  shorter,  parallel  line.  The  bodies  looked  winged 
to  him.  But  so  large  were  they  that  he  had  to  think  of  large 
birds.  He  thought  of  cranes. 

He  consulted  ornithologists,  and  learned  that  the  configuration 
of  parallel  lines  agrees  with  the  flight-formation  of  cranes.  This 
was  in  1880:  anybody  now  living  in  New  York  City,  for  instance, 
would  tell  him  that  also  it  is  a  familiar  formation  of  aeroplanes. 
But,  because  of  data  of  focus  and  subtended  angles,  these  beings 
or  objects  must  have  been  high. 

Sig.  Ricco  argues  that  condors  have  been  known  to  fly  3  or  4 
miles  high,  and  that  heights  reached  by  other  birds  have  been 
estimated  at  2  or  3  miles.  He  says  that  cranes  have  been  known 
to  fly  so  high  that  they  have  been  lost  to  view. 

Our  own  acceptance,  in  conventional  terms,  is  that  there  is  not 
a  bird  of  this  earth  that  would  not  freeze  to  death  at  a  height  of 
more  than  four  miles:  that  if  condors  fly  three  or  four  miles  high, 
they  are  birds  that  are  especially  adapted  to  such  altitudes. 

Sig.  Ricco's  estimate  is  that  these  objects  or  beings  or  cranes 
must  have  been  at  least  five  and  a  half  miles  high. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

THE  vast  dark  thing  that  looked  like  a  poised  crow  of  unholy 
dimensions.    Assuming  that  I  shall  ever  have  any  readers,  let 
him,  or  both  of  them,  if  I  shall  ever  have  such  popularity  as  that, 
note  how  dim  that  bold  black  datum  is  at  the  distance  of  only  two 
chapters. 

The  question: 

Was  it  a  thing  or  the  shadow  of  a  thing? 

Acceptance  either  way  calls  not  for  mere  revision  but  revolution 
in  the  science  of  astronomy.  But  the  dimness  of  the  datum  of  only 
two  chapters  ago.  The  carved  stone  disk  of  Tarbes,  and  the  rain 
that  fell  every  afternoon  for  twenty — if  I  haven't  forgotten,  myself, 
whether  it  was  twenty- three  or  twenty-five  days! — upon  one  small 
area.  We  are  all  Thomsons,  with  brains  that  have  smooth  and 
slippery,  though  corrugated,  surfaces — or  that  all  intellection  is  asso- 
ciative— or  that  we  remember  that  which  correlates  with  a  domi- 
nant— and  a  few  chapters  go  by,  and  there's  scarcely  an  impression 
that  hasn't  slid  off  our  smooth  and  slippery  brains,  of  Leverrier  and 
the  "planet  Vulcan."  There  are  two  ways  by  which  irreconcilables 
can  be  remembered — if  they  can  be  correlated  in  a  system  more 
nearly  real  than  the  system  that  rejects  them — and  by  repetition 
and  repetition  and  repetition. 

Vast  black  thing  like  a  crow  poised  over  the  moon. 

The  datum  is  so  important  to  us,  because  it  enforces,  in  another 
field,  our  acceptance  that  dark  bodies  of  planetary  size  traverse  this 
solar  system. 

Our  position: 

That  the  things  have  been  seen: 

Also  that  their  shadows  have  been  seen. 

Vast  black  thing  poised  like  a  crow  over  the  moon.  So  far  it  is 
a  single  instance.  By  a  single  instance,  we  mean  the  negligible. 

In  Popular  Science,  34-158,  Serviss  tells  of  a  shadow  that  Schroe- 
ter  saw,  in  1788,  in  the  lunar  Alps.  First  he  saw  a  light.  But  then, 
when  this  region  was  illuminated,  he  saw  a  round  shadow  where  the 
light  had  been. 

214 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  215 

Our  own  expression: 

That  he  saw  a  luminous  object  near  the  moon:  that  that  part  of 
the  moon  became  illuminated,  and  the  object  was  lost  to  view;  but 
that  then  its  shadow  underneath  was  seen. 

Serviss  explains,  of  course.  Otherwise  he'd  not  be  Prof.  Serviss. 
It's  a  little  contest  in  relative  approximations  to  realness.  Prof. 
Serviss  thinks  that  what  Schroeter  saw  was  the  "round"  shadow  of 
a  mountain — in  the  region  that  had  become  lighted.  He  assumes 
that  Schroeter  never  looked  again  to  see  whether  the  shadow  could 
be  attributed  to  a  mountain.  That's  the  crux:  conceivably  a  moun- 
tain could  cast  a  round — and  that  means  detached — shadow,  in  the 
lighted  part  of  the  moon.  Prof.  Serviss  could,  of  course,  explain 
why  he  disregards  the  light  in  the  first  place — maybe  it  had  always 
been  there  "in  the  first  place."  If  he  couldn't  explain,  he'd  still  be 
an  amateur. 

We  have  another  datum.  I  think  it  is  more  extraordinary 
than 

Vast  thing,  black  and  poised,  like  a  crow,  over  the  moon. 

But  only  because  it's  more  circumstantial,  and  because  it  has  cor- 
roboration,  do  I  think  it  more  extraordinary  than 

Vast  poised  thing,  black  as  a  crow,  over  the  moon. 

Mr.  H.  C.  Russell,  who  was  usually  as  orthodox  as  anybody,  I 
suppose — at  least,  he  wrote  "F.  R.  A.  S."  after  his  name — tells  in 
the  Observatory,  2-374,  one  of  the  wickedest,  or  most  preposterous, 
stories  that  we  have  so  far  exhumed: 

That  he  and  another  astronomer,  G.  D.  Hirst,  were  in  the  Blue 
Mountains,  near  Sydney,  N.  S.  W.,  and  Mr.  Hirst  was  looking  at 
the  moon 

He  saw  on  the  moon  what  Russell  calls  "one  of  those  remarkable 
facts,  which  being  seen  should  be  recorded,  although  no  explanation 
can  at  present  be  offered." 

That  may  be  so.  It  is  very  rarely  done.  Our  own  expression  upon 
evolution  by  successive  dominants  and  their  correlates  is  against  it. 
On  the  other  hand,  we  express  that  every  era  records  a  few  observa- 
tions out  of  harmony  with  it,  but  adumbratory  or  preparatory  to 
the  spirit  of  eras  still  to  come.  It's  very  rarely  done.  Lashed  by 
the  phantom-scourge  of  a  now  passing  era,  the  world  of  astron- 
omers is  in  a  state  of  terrorism,  though  of  a  highly  attenuated, 
modernized,  devitalized  kind.  Let  an  astronomer  see  something  that 
is  not  of  the  conventional,  celestial  sights,  or  something  that  it  is 
"improper"  to  see — his  very  dignity  is  in  danger.  Some  one  of  the 


216  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

corraled  and  scourged  may  stick  a  smile  into  his  back.  He'll  be 
thought  of  unkindly. 

With  a  hardihood  that  is  unusual  in  his  world  of  ethereal  sensi- 
tivenesses, Russell  says,  of  Hirst's  observation: 

"He  found  a  large  part  of  it  covered  with  a  dark  shade,  quite  as 
dark  as  the  shadow  of  the  earth  during  an  eclipse  of  the  moon." 

But  the  climax  of  hardihood  or  impropriety  or  wickedness,  pre- 
posterousness  or  enlightenment: 

"One  could  hardly  resist  the  conviction  that  it  was  a  shadow,  yet 
it  eould  not  be  the  shadow  of  any  known  body." 

Richard  Proctor  was  a  man  of  some  liberality.  After  a  while  we 
shall  have  a  letter,  which  once  upon  a  time  we'd  have  called  de- 
lirious— don't  know  that  we  could  read  such  a  thing  now,  for  the 
first  time,  without  incredulous  laughter — which  Mr.  Proctor  per- 
mitted to  be  published  in  Knowledge.  But  a  dark,  unknown  world 
that  could  cast  a  shadow  upon  a  large  part  of  the  moon,  perhaps 
extending  far  beyond  the  limb  of  the  moon;  a  shadow  as  deep  as 
the  shadow  of  this  earth 

Too  much  for  Mr.  Proctor's  politeness. 

I  haven't  read  what  he  said,  but  it  seems  to  have  been  a  little 
coarse.  Russell  says  that  Proctor  "freely  used"  his  name  in  the 
Echo,  of  March  14,  1879,  ridiculing  this  observation  which  had 
been  made  by  Russell  as  well  as  Hirst.  If  it  hadn't  been  Proctor, 
it  would  have  been  some  one  else — but  one  notes  that  the  attack 
came  out  in  a  newspaper.  There  is  no  discussion  of  this  remarkable 
subject,  no  mention  in  any  other  astronomic  journal.  The  disregard 
was  almost  complete — but  we  do  note  that  the  columns  of  the 
Observatory  were  open  to  Russell  to  answer  Proctor. 

In  the  answer,  I  note  considerable  intermediateness.  Far  back 
in  1879,  it  would  have  been  a  beautiful  positivism,  if  Russell  had 
said 

"There  was  a  shadow  on  the  moon.  Absolutely  it  was  cast  by  an 
unknown  body." 

According  to  our  religion,  if  he  had  then  given  all  his  time  to  the 
maintaining  of  this  one  stand,  of  course  breaking  all  friendships,  all 
ties  with  his  fellow  astronomers,  his  apotheosis  would  have  occurred, 
greatly  assisted  by  means  well  known  to  quasi-existence  when  its 
compromises  and  evasions,  and  phenomena  that  are  partly  this  and 
partly  that,  are  flouted  by  the  definite  and  uncompromising.  It 
would  be  impossible  in  a  real  existence,  but  Mr.  Russell,  of  quasi- 
existence,  says  that  he  did  resist  the  conviction;  that  he  had  said 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  217 

that  one  could  "hardly  resist";  and  most  of  his  resentment  is  against 
Mr.  Proctor's  thinking  that  he  had  not  resisted.  It  seems  too  bad — 
if  apotheosis  be  desirable. 

The  point  in  Intermediatism  here  is: 

Not  that  to  adapt  to  the  conditions  of  quasi-existence  is  to  have 
what  is  called  success  in  quasi-existence,  but  is  to  lose  one's  soul 

But  is  to  lose  "one's"  chance  of  attaining  soul,  self,  or  entity. 

One  indignation  quoted  from  Proctor  interests  us: 

"What  happens  on  the  moon  may  at  any  time  happen  to  this 
earth." 

Or: 

That  is  just  the  teaching  of  this  department  of  Advanced 
Astronomy: 

That  Russell  and  Hirst  saw  the  sun  eclipsed  relatively  to  the 
moon  by  a  vast  dark  body; 

That  many  times  have  eclipses  occurred  relatively  to  this  earth, 
by  vast,  dark  bodies; 

That  there  have  been  many  eclipses  that  have  not  been  recog- 
nized as  eclipses  by  scientific  kindergartens. 

There  is  a  merger,  of  course.  We'll  take  a  look  at  it  first — that, 
after  all,  it  may  have  been  a  shadow  that  Hirst  and  Russell  saw, 
but  the  only  significance  is  that  the  sun  was  eclipsed  relatively  to 
the  moon  by  a  cosmic  haze  of  some  kind,  or  a  swarm  of  meteors 
close  together,  or  a  gaseous  discharge  left  behind  by  a  comet.  My 
own  acceptance  is  that  vagueness  of  shadow  is  a  function  of  vague- 
ness of  intervention;  that  a  shadow  as  dense  as  the  shadow  of  this 
earth  is  cast  by  a  body  denser  than  hazes  and  swarms.  The  infor- 
mation seems  definite  enough  in  this  respect — "quite  as  dark  as  the 
shadow  of  this  earth  during  the  eclipse  of  the  moon." 

Though  we  may  not  always  be  as  patient  toward  them  as  we 
should  be,  it  is  our  acceptance  that  the  astronomic  primitives  have 
done  a  great  deal  of  good  work:  for  instance,  in  the  allaying  of 
fears  upon  this  earth.  Sometimes  it  may  seem  as  if  all  science  were 
to  us  very  much  like  what  a  red  flag  is  to  bulls  and  anti-socialists. 
It's  not  that:  it's  more  like  what  unsquare  meals  are  to  bulls  and 
anti-socialists — not  the  scientific,  but  the  insufficient.  Our  accept- 
ance is  that  Evil  is  the  negative  state,  by  which  we  mean  the  state 
of  maladjustment,  discord,  ugliness,  disorganization,  inconsistency, 
injustice,  and  so  on — as  determined  in  Intermediateness,  not  by  real 
standards,  but  only  by  higher  approximations  to  adjustment,  har- 
mony, beauty,  organization,  consistency,  justice,  and  so  on.  Evil  is 


2i8  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

outlived  virtue,  or  incipient  virtue  that  has  not  yet  established  itself, 
or  any  other  phenomenon  that  is  not  in  seeming  adjustment,  har- 
mony, consistency  with  a  dominant.  The  astronomers  have  func- 
tioned bravely  in  the  past.  They've  been  good  for  business:  the  big 
interests  think  kindly,  if  at  all,  of  them.  It's  bad  for  trade  to  have 
an  intense  darkness  come  upon  an  unaware  community  and  frighten 
people  out  of  their  purchasing  values.  But  if  an  obscuration  be 
foretold,  and  if  it  then  occur — may  seem  a  little  uncanny — only  a 
shadow — and  no  one  who  was  about  to  buy  a  pair  of  shoes  runs 
home  panic-stricken  and  saves  the  money. 

Upon  general  principles  we  accept  that  astronomers  have  quasi- 
systematized  data  of  eclipses — or  have  included  some  and  disre- 
garded others. 

They  have  done  well. 

They  have  functioned. 

But  now  they're  negatives,  or  they're  out  of  harmony 

If  we  are  in  harmony  with  a  new  dominant,  or  the  spirit  of  a  new 
era,  in  which  Exclusionism  must  be  overthrown;  if  we  have  data 
of  many  obscurations  that  have  occurred,  not  only  upon  the  moon, 
but  upon  our  own  earth,  as  convincing  of  vast  intervening  bodies, 
usually  invisible,  as  is  any  regularized,  predicted  eclipse. 

One  looks  up  at  the  sky. 

It  seems  incredible  that,  say,  at  the  distance  of  the  moon,  there 
could  be,  but  be  invisible,  a  solid  body,  say  the  size  of  the  moon. 

One  looks  up  at  the  moon,  at  a  time  when  only  a  crescent  of  it 
is  visible.  The  tendency  is  to  build  up  the  rest  of  it  in  one's  mind ; 
but  the  unillumined  part  looks  as  vacant  as  the  rest  of  the  sky,  and 
it's  of  the  same  blueness  as  the  rest  of  the  sky.  There's  a  vast  area 
of  solid  substance  before  one's  eyes.  It's  indistinguishable  from  the 
sky. 

In  some  of  our  little  lessons  upon  the  beauties  of  modesty  and 
humility,  we  have  picked  out  basic  arrogances — tail  of  a  peacock, 
horns  of  a  stag,  dollars  of  a  capitalist — eclipses  of  astronomers. 
Though  I  have  no  desire  for  the  job,  I'd  engage  to  list  hundreds  of 
instances  in  which  the  report  upon  an  expected  eclipse  has  been 
"sky  overcast"  or  "weather  unfavorable."  In  our  Super-Hibernia, 
the  unfavorable  has  been  construed  as  the  favorable.  Some  time 
ago,  when  we  were  lost,  because  we  had  not  recognized  our  own 
dominant,  when  we  were  still  of  the  unchosen  and  likely  to  be  more 
malicious  than  we  now  are — because  we  have  noted  a  steady  toler- 
ance creeping  into  our  attitude — if  astronomers  are  not  to  blame, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  219 

but  are  only  correlates  to  a  dominant — we  advertised^  predicted 
eclipse  that  did  not  occur  at  all.  Now,  without  any  especial  feel- 
ing, except  that  of  recognition  of  the  fate  of  all  attempted  absolu- 
tism, we  give  the  instance,  noting  that,  though  such  an  evil  thing 
to  orthodoxy,  it  was  orthodoxy  that  recorded  the  non-event. 

Monthly  Notices  of  the  R.  A.  5.,  8-132: 

"Remarkable  appearances  during  the  total  eclipse  of  the  moon 
on  March  19,  1848": 

In  an  extract  from  a  letter  from  Mr.  Forster,  of  Bruges,  it  is 
said  that,  according  to  the  writer's  observations  at  the  time  of  the 
predicted  total  eclipse,  the  moon  shone  with  about  three  times  the 
intensity  of  the  mean  illumination  of  an  eclipsed  lunar  disk:  that 
the  British  Consul,  at  Ghent,  who  did  not  know  of  the  predicted 
eclipse,  had  written  enquiring  as  to  the  "blood-red"  color  of  the 
moon. 

This  is  not  very  satisfactory  to  what  used  to  be  our  malices.  But 
there  follows  another  letter,  from  another  astronomer,  Walkey,  who 
had  made  observations  at  Clyst  St.  Lawrence:  that,  instead  of  an 
eclipse,  the  moon  became — as  is  printed  in  italics — "most  beauti- 
fully illuminated"  .  .  .  "rather  tinged  with  a  deep  red"  .  .  .  "the 
moon  being  as  perfect  with  light  as  if  there  had  been  no  eclipse 
whatever." 

I  note  that  Chambers,  in  his  work  upon  eclipses,  gives  Forster's 
letter  in  full — and  not  a  mention  of  Walkey's  letter. 

There  is  no  attempt  in  Monthly  Notices  to  explain  upon  the 
notion  of  greater  distance  of  the  moon,  and  the  earth's  shadow  fall- 
ing short,  which  would  make  as  much  trouble  for  astronomers,  if 
that  were  not  foreseen,  as  no  eclipse  at  all.  Also  there  is  no  refuge 
in  saying  that  virtually  never,  even  in  total  eclipses,  is  the  moon 
totally  dark — "as  perfect  with  light  as  if  there  had  been  no  eclipse 
whatever."  It  is  said  that  at  the  time  there  had  been  an  aurora 
borealis,  which  might  have  caused  the  luminosity,  without  a  datum 
that  such  an  effect,  by  an  aurora,  had  ever  been  observed  upon  the 
moon. 

But  single  instances — so  an  observation  by  Scott,  in  the  Antarctic. 
The  force  of  this  datum  lies  in  my  own  acceptance,  based  upon 
especially  looking  up  this  point,  that  an  eclipse  nine-tenths  of  to- 
tality has  great  effect,  even  though  the  sky  be  clouded. 

Scott  (Voyage  of  the  Discovery,  vol.  n,  p.  215): 

"There  may  have  been  an  eclipse  of  the  sun,  Sept.  21,  1903,  as 


220  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

the  almanac  said,  but  we  should,  none  of  us,  have  liked  to  swear  to 
the  fact." 

This  eclipse  had  been  set  down  at  nine-tenths  of  totality.  The 
sky  was  overcast  at  the  time. 

So  it  is  not  only  that  many  eclipses  unrecognized  by  astronomers 
as  eclipses  have  occurred,  but  that  intermediatism,  or  impositivism, 
breaks  into  their  own  seemingly  regularized  eclipses. 

Our  data  of  unregularized  eclipses,  as  profound  as  those  that  are 
conventionally — or  officially? — recognized,  that  have  occurred  rela- 
tively to  this  earth: 

In*  Notes  and  Queries  there  are  several  allusions  to  intense  dark- 
nesses that  have  occurred  upon  this  earth,  quite  as  eclipses  occur, 
but  that  are  not  referable  to  any  known  eclipsing  body.  Of  course 
there  is  no  suggestion  here  that  these  darknesses  may  have  been 
eclipses.  My  own  acceptance  is  that,  if  in  the  nineteenth  century 
any  one  had  uttered  such  a  thought  as  that,  he'd  have  felt  the  blight 
of  a  Dominant;  that  Materialistic  Science  was  a  jealous  god,  ex- 
cluding, as  works  of  the  devil,  all  utterances  against  the  seemingly 
uniform,  regular,  periodic;  that  to  defy  him  would  have  brought 
on — withering  by  ridicule — shrinking  away  by  publishers — con- 
tempt of  friends  and  family — justifiable  grounds  for  divorce — that 
one  who  would  so  defy  would  feel  what  unbelievers  in  relics  of 
saints  felt  in  an  earlier  age;  what  befell  virgins  who  forgot  to  keep 
fires  burning,  in  a  still  earlier  age — but  that,  if  he'd  almost  absolutely 
hold  out,  just  the  same — new  fixed  star  reported  in  Monthly  Notices. 
Altogether,  the  point  in  Positivism  here  is  that  by  Dominants  and 
their  correlates,  quasi-existence  strives  for  the  positive  state,  aggre- 
gating, around  a  nucleus,  or  dominant,  systematized  members  of  a 
religion,  a  science,  a  society — but  that  "individuals"  who  do  not 
surrender  and  submerge  may  of  themselves  highly  approximate  to 
positiveness — the  fixed,  the  real,  the  absolute. 

In  Notes  and  Queries,  2-4-139,  there  is  an  account  of  a  darkness 
in  Holland,  in  the  midst  of  a  bright  day,  so  intense  and  terrifying 
that  many  panic-stricken  persons  lost  their  lives  stumbling  into  the 
canals. 

Gentleman's  Magazine,  33-414: 

A  darkness  that  came  upon  London,  August  19,  1763,  "greater 
than  at  the  great  eclipse  of  1748." 

However,  our  preference  is  not  to  go  so  far  back  for  data.  For  a 
list  of  historic  "dark  days,"  see  Humboldt,  Cosmos,  1-120. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  March,  1886-79: 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  221 

That,  according  to  the  La  Crosse  Daily  Republ  zany  of  March  20. 
1886,  darkness  suddenly  settled  upon  the  city  of  Oshkosh,  Wis., 
at  3  p.  m.,  March  19.  In  five  minutes  the  darkness  equaled  that  of 
midnight. 

Consternation. 

I  think  that  some  of  us  are  likely  to  overdo  our  own  superiority 
and  the  absurd  fears  of  the  Middle  Ages 

Oshkosh. 

People  in  the  streets  rushing  in  all  directions — horses  running 
away — women  and  children  running  into  cellars — little  modern 
touch  after  all:  gas  meters  instead  of  images  and  relics  of  saints. 

This  darkness,  which  lasted  from  eight  to  ten  minutes,  occurred 
in  a  day  that  had  been  "light  but  cloudy."  It  passed  from  west  to 
east,  and  brightness  followed:  then  came  reports  from  towns  to  the 
west  of  Oshkosh:  that  the  same  phenomenon  had  already  occurred 
there.  A  "wave  of  total  darkness"  had  passed  from  west  to  east. 

Other  instances  are  recorded  in  the  Monthly  Weather  Review, 
but,  as  to  all  of  them,  we  have  a  sense  of  being  pretty  well-eclipsed, 
ourselves,  by  the  conventional  explanation  that  the  obscuring  body 
was  only  a  very  dense  mass  of  clouds.  But  some  of  the  instances 
are  interesting — intense  darkness  at  Memphis,  Tenn.,  for  about  fif- 
teen minutes,  at  10  a.  m.,  Dec.  2,  1904 — "We  are  told  that  in  some 
quarters  a  panic  prevailed,  and  that  some  were  shouting  and  praying 
and  imagining  that  the  end  of  the  world  had  come."  (M.  W.  R., 
32-522.)  At  Louisville,  Ky.,  March  7,  1911,  at  about  8  a.  m.:  dura- 
tion about  half  an  hour;  had  been  raining  moderately,  and  then 
hail  had  fallen.  "The  intense  blackness  and  general  ominous  ap- 
pearance of  the  storm  spread  terror  throughout  the  city."  (M.  W. 

R.,  39-345-) 

However,  this  merger  between  possible  eclipses  by  unknown  dark 
bodies  and  commonplace  terrestrial  phenomena  is  formidable. 

As  to  darknesses  that  have  fallen  upon  vast  areas,  conventionality 
is — smoke  from  forest  fires.  In  the  U.  S.  Forest  Service  Bulletint 
No.  117,  F.  G.  Plummer  gives  a  list  of  eighteen  darknesses  that 
have  occurred  in  the  United  States  and  Canada.  He  is  one  of  the 
primitives,  but  I  should  say  that  his  dogmatism  is  shaken  by  vibra- 
tions from  the  new  Dominant.  His  difficulty,  which  he  acknowl- 
edges, but  which  he  would  have  disregarded  had  he  written  a  decade 
or  so  earlier,  is  the  profundity  of  some  of  these  obscurations.  He 
says  that  mere  smokiness  can  not  account  for  such  "awe-inspiring 
dark  days."  So  he  conceives  of  eddies  in  the  air,  concentrating  the 


222  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

smoke  from  fores  fires.  Then,  in  the  inconsistency  or  discord  of 
all  quasi-intellection  that  is  striving  for  consistency  or  harmony,  he 
tells  of  the  vastness  of  some  of  these  darknesses.  Of  course  Mr. 
Plummer  did  not  really  think  upon  this  subject,  but  one  does  feel 
that  he  might  have  approximated  higher  to  real  thinking  than  by 
speaking  of  concentration  and  then  listing  data  of  enormous  area, 
or  the  opposite  of  circumstances  of  concentration — because,  of  his 
nineteen  instances,  nine  are  set  down  as  covering  all  New  England. 
In  quasi-existence,  everything  generates  or  is  part  of  its  own  op- 
posite. Every  attempt  at  peace  prepares  the  way  for  war;  all 
attempts  at  justice  result  in  injustice  in  some  other  respect:  so  Mr. 
Plummer's  attempt  to  bring  order  into  his  data,  with  the  explana- 
tion of  darkness  caused  by  smoke  from  forest  fires,  results  in  such 
confusion  that  he  ends  up  by  saying  that  these  daytime  darknesses 
have  occurred  "often  with  little  or  no  turbidity  of  the  air  near  the 
earth's  surface" — or  with  no  evidence  at  all  of  smoke — except  that 
there  is  almost  always  a  forest  fire  somewhere. 

However,  of  the  eighteen  instances,  the  only  one  that  I'd  bother 
to  contest  is  the  profound  darkness  in  Canada  and  northern  parts 
of  the  United  States,  Nov.  19,  1819 — which  we  have  already  con- 
sidered. 

Its  concomitants: 

Lights  in  the  sky; 

Fall  of  a  black  substance; 

Shocks  like  those  of  an  earthquake. 

In  this  instance,  the  only  available  forest  fire  was  one  to  the 
south  of  the  Ohio  River.  For  all  I  know,  soot  from  a  very  great 
fire  south  of  the  Ohio  might  fall  in  Montreal,  Canada,  and  con- 
ceivably, by  some  freak  of  reflection,  light  from  it  might  be  seen  in 
Montreal,  but  the  earthquake  is  not  assimilable  with  a  forest  fire. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  will  soon  be  our  expression  that  profound 
darkness,  fall  of  matter  from  the  sky,  lights  in  the  sky,  and  earth- 
quakes are  phenomena  of  the  near  approach  of  other  worlds  to  this 
world.  It  is  such  comprehensiveness,  as  contrasted  with  inclusion  of 
a  few  factors  and  disregard  for  the  rest,  that  we  call  higher  approxi- 
mation to  realness — or  universalness. 

A  darkness,  of  April  17,  1904,  at  Wimbledon,  England  (Symons* 
Met.  Mag.,  39-69).  It  came  from  a  smokeless  region:  no  rain,  no 
thunder;  lasted  10  minutes;  too  dark  to  go  "even  out  in  the  open." 

As  to  darknesses  in  Great  Britain,  one  thinks  of  fogs — but  in 
Nature,  25-289,  there  are  some  observations  by  Major  J.  Herschel, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  223 

upon  an  obscuration  in  London,  Jan.  22,  1882,  at  10.30  a.  m.,  so 
great  that  he  could  hear  persons  upon  the  opposite  side  of  the 
street,  but  could  not  see  them — "It  was  obvious  that  there  was  no 
fog  to  speak  of." 

Annual  Register,  1857-132: 

An  account  by  Charles  A.  Murray,  British  Envoy  to  Persia,  of  a 
darkness  of  May  20,  1857,  that  came  upon  Bagdad — "a  darkness 
more  intense  than  ordinary  midnight,  when  neither  stars  nor  moon 
are  visible.  .  .  ."  "After  a  short  time  the  black  darkness  was  suc- 
ceeded by  a  red,  lurid  gloom,  such  as  I  never  saw  in  any  part  of 
the  world." 

"Panic  seized  the  whole  city." 

"A  dense  volume  of  red  sand  fell." 

This  matter  of  sand  falling  seems  to  suggest  conventional  ex- 
planation enough,  or  that  a  simoon,  heavily  charged  with  terrestrial 
sand,  had  obscured  the  sun,  but  Mr.  Murray,  who  says  that  he  had 
had  experience  with  simoons,  gives  his  opinion  that  "it  can  not  have 
been  a  simoon." 

It  is  our  comprehensiveness  now,  or  this  matter  of  concomitants 
of  darknesses  that  we  are  going  to  capitalize.  It  is  all  very  compli- 
cated and  tremendous,  and  our  own  treatment  can  be  but  impres- 
sionistic, but  a  few  of  the  rudiments  of  Advanced  Seismology  we 
shall  now  take  up — or  the  four  principle  phenomena  of  another 
world's  close  approach  to  this  world. 

If  a  large  substantial  mass,  or  super-construction,  should  enter 
this  earth's  atmosphere,  it  is  our  acceptance  that  it  would  some- 
times— depending  upon  velocity — appear  luminous  or  look  like  a 
cloud,  or  like  a  cloud  with  a  luminous  nucleus.  Later  we  shall  have 
an  expression  upon  luminosity — different  from  the  luminosity  of 
incandescence — that  comes  upon  objects  falling  from  the  sky,  or 
entering  this  earth's  atmosphere.  Now  our  expression  is  that  worlds 
have  often  come  close  to  this  earth,  and  that  smaller  objects — size 
of  a  haystack  or  size  of  several  dozen  skyscrapers  lumped,  have 
often  hurtled  through  this  earth's  atmosphere,  and  have  been  mis- 
taken for  clouds,  because  they  were  enveloped  in  clouds 

Or  that  around  something  coming  from  the  intense  cold  of  inter- 
planetary space — that  is  of  some  regions:  our  own  suspicion  is  that 
other  regions  are  tropical — the  moisture  of  this  earth's  atmosphere 
would  condense  into  a  cloud-like  appearance  around  it.  In  Nature, 
20-121,  there  is  an  account  by  Mr.  S.  W.  Clifton,  Collector  of  Cus- 
toms, at  Freemantle,  Western  Australia,  sent  to  the  Melbourne 


224  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Observatory — a  clear  day — appearance  of  a  small  black  cloud,  mov- 
ing not  very  swiftly — bursting  into  a  ball  of  fire,  of  the  apparent 
size  of  the  moon 

Or  that  something  with  the  velocity  of  an  ordinary  meteorite 
could  not  collect  vapor  around  it,  but  that  slower-moving  objects — 
speed  of  a  railway  train,  say — may. 

The  clouds  of  tornadoes  have  so  often  been  described  as  if  they 
were  solid  objects  that  I  now  accept  that  sometimes  they  are:  that 
some  so-called  tornadoes  are  objects  hurtling  through  this  earth's 
atmosphere,  not  only  generating  disturbances  by  their  suctions,  but 
crushing,  with  their  bulk,  all  things  in  their  way,  rising  and  falling 
and  finally  disappearing,  demonstrating  that  gravitation  is  not  the 
power  that  the  primitives  think  it  is,  if  an  object  moving  at  rela- 
tively low  velocity  be  not  pulled  to  this  earth,  or  being  so  mo- 
mentarily affected,  bounds  away. 

In  Finley's  Reports  on  the  Character  of  600  Tornadoes  very  sug- 
gestive bits  of  description  occur: 

"Cloud  bounded  along  the  earth  like  a  ball" 

Or  that  it  was  no  meteorological  phenomenon,  but  something 
very  much  like  a  huge  solid  ball  that  was  bounding  along,  crushing 
and  carrying  with  it  everything  within  its  field 

"Cloud  bounded  along,  coming  to  the  earth  every  eight  hundred 
or  one  thousand  yards." 

Here's  an  interesting  bit  that  I  got  somewhere  else.  I  offer  it  as 
a  datum  in  super-biology,  which,  however,  is  a  branch  of  advanced 
science  that  I'll  not  take  up,  restricting  to  things  indefinitely  called 
"objects" 

"The  tornado  came  wriggling,  jumping,  whirling  like  a  great 
green  snake,  darting  out  a  score  of  glistening  fangs." 

Though  it's  interesting,  I  think  that's  sensational,  myself.  It 
may  be  that  vast  green  snakes  sometimes  rush  past  this  earth,  taking 
a  swift  bite  wherever  they  can,  but,  as  I  say,  that's  a  super-biologic 
phenomenon.  Finley  gives  dozens  of  instances  of  tornado  clouds 
that  seem  to  me  more  like  solid  things  swathed  in  clouds,  than 
clouds.  He  notes  that,  in  the  tornado  at  Americus,  Georgia,  July 
1 8,  1 88 1,  "a  strange  sulphurous  vapor  was  emitted  from  the  cloud." 
In  many  instances,  objects,  or  meteoritic  stones,  that  have  come 
from  this  earth's  externality,  have  had  a  sulphurous  odor.  Why  a 
wind  effect  should  be  sulphurous  is  not  clear.  That  a  vast  object 
from  external  regions  should  be  sulphurous  is  in  line  with  many 
data.  This  phenomenon  is  described  in  the  Monthly  Weather  Re- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  225 

view,  July,  1 88 1,  as  "a  strange  sulphurous  vapor  .  .  .  burning  and 
sickening  all  who  approached  close  enough  to  breathe  it." 

The  conventional  explanation  of  tornadoes  as  wind-effects — which 
we  do  not  deny  in  some  instances — is  so  strong  in  the  United  States 
that  it  is  better  to  look  elsewhere  for  an  account  of  an  object  that 
has  hurtled  through  this  earth's  atmosphere,  rising  and  falling  and 
defying  this  earth's  gravitation. 

Nature,  7-112: 

That,  according  to  a  correspondent  to  the  Birmingham  Morning 
News,  the  people  living  near  King's  Sutton,  Banbury,  saw,  about 
one  o'clock,  Dec.  7,  1872,  something  like  a  haycock  hurtling  through 
the  air.  Like  a  meteor  it  was  accompanied  by  fire  and  a  dense 
smoke  and  made  a  noise  like  that  of  a  railway  train.  "It  was  some- 
times high  in  the  air  and  sometimes  near  the  ground."  The  effect 
#as  tornado-like:  trees  and  walls  were  knocked  down.  It's  a  late 
day  now  to  try  to  verify  this  story,  but  a  list  is  given  of  persons 
whose  property  was  injured.  We  are  told  that  this  thing  then  dis- 
appeared "all  at  once." 

These  are  the  smaller  objects,  which  may  be  derailed  railway 
trains  or  big  green  snakes,  for  all  I  know — but  our  expression  upon 
approach  to  this  earth  by  vast  dark  bodies 

That  likely  they'd  be  made  luminous:  would  envelope  in  clouds, 
perhaps,  or  would  have  their  own  clouds 

But  that  they'd  quake,  and  that  they'd  affect  this  earth  with 

And  that  then  would  occur  a  fall  of  matter  from  such  a  world, 
or  rise  of  matter  from  this  earth  to  a  nearby  world,  or  both  fall 
and  rise,  or  exchange  of  matter — process  known  to  Advanced 
Seismology  as  celestio-metathesis • 

Except  that — if  matter  from  some  other  world — and  it  would  be 
like  some  one  to  get  it  into  his  head  that  we  absolutely  deny  gravita- 
tion, just  because  we  can  not  accept  orthodox  dogmas — except  that, 
if  matter  from  another  world,  filling  the  sky  of  this  earth,  generally, 
as  to  a  hemisphere,  or  locally,  should  be  attracted  to  this  earth,  it 
would  seem  thinkable  that  the  whole  thing  should  drop  here,  and 
not  merely  its  surface-materials. 

Objects  upon  a  ship's  bottom.  From  time  to  time  they  drop  to 
the  bottom  of  the  ocean.  The  ship  does  not. 

Or,  like  our  acceptance  upon  dripping  from  aerial  ice-fields,  we 
think  of  only  a  part  of  a  nearby  world  succumbing,  except  in  being 


226  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

caught  in  suspension,  to  this  earth's  gravitation,  and  surface- 
materials  falling  from  that  part 

Explain  or  express  or  accept,  and  what  does  it  matter?  Our 
attitude  is: 

Here  are  the  data. 

See  for  yourself. 

What  does  it  matter  what  my  notions  may  be? 

Here  are  the  data. 

But  think  for  yourself,  or  think  for  myself,  all  mixed  up  we  must 
be.  A  long  time  must  go  by  before  we  can  know  Florida  from 
Long  Island.  So  we've  had  data  of  fishes  that  have  fallen  from 
our  now  established  and  respectabilized  Super-Sargasso  Sea — which 
we've  almost  forgotten,  it's  now  so  respectable — but  we  shall  have 
data  of  fishes  that  have  fallen  during  earthquakes.  These  we  ac- 
cept were  dragged  down  from  ponds  or  other  worlds  that  have  been 
quaked,  when  only  a  few  miles  away,  by  this  earth,  some  other 
world  also  quaking  this  earth. 

In  a  way,  or  in  its  principle,  our  subject  is  orthodox  enough. 
Only  grant  proximity  of  other  worlds — which,  however,  will  not  be 
a  matter  of  granting,  but  will  be  a  matter  of  data — and  one  conven- 
tionally conceives  of  their  surfaces  quaked — even  of  a  whole  lake 
full  of  fishes  being  quaked  and  dragged  down  from  one  of  them. 
The  lake  full  of  fishes  may  cause  a  little  pain  to  some  minds,  but 
the  fall  of  sand  and  stones  is  pleasantly  enough  thought  of.  More 
scientific  persons,  or  more  faithful  hypnotics  than  we,  have  taken 
up  this  subject,  unpainfully,  relatively  to  the  moon.  For  instance, 
Perrey  has  gone  over  15,000  records  of  earthquakes,  and  he  has 
correlated  many  with  proximities  of  the  moon,  or  has  attributed 
many  to  the  pull  of  the  moon  when  nearest  this  earth.  Also  there 
is  a  paper  upon  this  subject  in  the  Proc.  Roy.  Soc.  of  Cornwall, 
1845.  Or>  theoretically,  when  at  its  closest  to  this  earth,  the  moon 
quakes  the  face  of  this  earth,  and  is  itself  quaked — but  does  not 
itself  fall  to  this  earth.  As  to  showers  of  matter  that  may  have 
come  from  the  moon  at  such  times — one  can  go  over  old  records 
and  find  what  one  pleases. 

That  is  what  we  now  shall  do. 

Our  expressions  are  for  acceptance  only. 

Our  data: 

We  take  them  from  four  classes  of  phenomena  that  have  pre- 
ceded or  accompanied  earthquakes: 

Unusual  clouds,  darkness  profound,  luminous  appearances  in  the 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  227 

sky,  and  falls  of  substances  and  objects  whether  commonly  called 
meteoritic  or  not. 

Not  one  of  these  occurrences  fits  in  with  principles  of  primitive, 
or  primary,  seismology,  and  every  one  of  them  is  a  datum  of  a 
quaked  body  passing  close  to  this  earth  or  suspended  over  it.  To 
the  primitives  there  is  not  a  reason  in  the  world  why  a  convulsion 
of  this  earth's  surface  should  be  accompanied  by  unusual  sights  in 
the  sky,  by  darkness,  or  by  the  fall  of  substances  or  objects  from 
the  sky.  As  to  phenomena  like  these,  or  storms,  preceding  earth- 
quakes, the  irreconcilability  is  still  greater. 

It  was  before  1860  that  Perrey  made  his  great  compilation.  We 
take  most  of  our  data  from  lists  compiled  long  ago.  Only  the  safe 
and  unpainful  have  been  published  in  recent  years — at  least  in 
ambitious,  voluminous  form.  The  restraining  hand  of  the  "System" 
— as  we  call  it,  whether  it  has  any  real  existence  or  not — is  tight 
upon  the  sciences  of  to-day.  The  uncanniest  aspect  of  our  quasi- 
existence  that » I  know  of  is  that  everything  that  seems  to  have  one 
identity  has  also  as  high  a  seeming  of  everything  else.  In  this  one- 
ness of  allness,  or  continuity,  the  protecting  hand  strangles;  the 
parental  stifles;  love  is  inseparable  from  phenomena  of  hate.  There 
is  only  Continuity — that  is  in  quasi-existence.  Nature,  at  least  in 
its  correspondents'  columns,  still  evades  this  protective  strangula- 
tion, and  the  Monthly  Weather  Review  is  still  a  rich  field  of  un- 
faithful observation:  but,  in  looking  over  other  long-established 
periodicals,  I  have  noted  their  glimmers  of  quasi-individuality  fade 
gradually,  after  about  1860,  and  the  surrender  of  their  attempted 
identities  to  a  higher  attempted  organization.  Some  of  them,  ex- 
pressing Intermediateness-wide  endeavor  to  localize  the  universal, 
or  to  localize  self,  soul,  identity,  entity — or  positiveness  or  realness 
— held  out  until  as  far  as  1880;  traces  findable  up  to  1890 — and 
then,  expressing  the  universal  process — except  that  here  and  there 
in  the  world's  history  there  may  have  been  successful  approxima- 
tions to  positiveness  by  "individuals" — who  only  then  became  in- 
dividuals and  attained  to  selves  or  souls  of  their  own — surrendered, 
submitted,  became  parts  of  a  higher  organization's  attempt  to  in- 
dividualize or  systematize  into  a  complete  thing,  or  to  localize  the 
universal  or  the  attributes  of  the  universal.  After  the  death  of 
Richard  Proctor,  whose  occasional  illiberalities  I'd  not  like  to  em- 
phasize too  much,  all  succeeding  volumes  of  Knowledge  have 
yielded  scarcely  an  unconventionality.  Note  the  great  number  of 
times  that  the  American  Journal  of  Science  and  the  Report  of  the 


228  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

British  Association  are  quoted:  note  that,  after,  say,  1885,  they're 
scarcely  mentioned  in  these  inspired  but  illicit  pages — as  by  hypno- 
sis and  inertia,  we  keep  on  saying. 

About  1880. 

Throttle  and  disregard. 

But  the  coercion  could  not  be  positive,  and  many  of  the  excom- 
municated continued  to  creep  in;  or,  even  to  this  day,  some  of  the 
strangled  are  faintly  breathing. 

Some  of  our  data  have  been  hard  to  find.  We  could  tell  stories  of 
great  labor  and  fruitless  quests  that  would,  though  perhaps  imper- 
ceptibly, stir  the  sympathy  of  a  Mr.  Symons.  But,  in  this  matter 
of  concurrence  of  earthquakes  with  aerial  phenomena,  which  are  as 
unassociable  with  earthquakes,  if  internally  caused,  as  falls  of  sand 
on  convulsed  small  boys  full  of  sour  apples,  the  abundance  of  so- 
called  evidence  is  so  great  that  we  can  only  sketchily  go  over  the 
data,  beginning  with  Robert  Mallet's  Catalogue  (Kept.  Brit.  Assoc., 
1852),  omitting  some  extraordinary  instances,  because  they  oc- 
curred before  the  eighteenth  century: 

Earthquake  "preceded"  by  a  violent  tempest,  England,  Jan.  8, 
1704 — "preceded"  by  a  brilliant  meteor,  Switzerland,  Nov.  4,  1704 
— "luminous  cloud,  moving  at  high  velocity,  disappearing  behind 
the  horizon,"  Florence,  Dec.  9,  1731 — "thick  mists  in  the  air, 
through  which  a  dim  light  was  seen:  several  weeks  before  the 
shock,  globes  of  light  had  been  seen  in  the  air,"  Swabia,  May  22, 
1732 — rain  of  earth,  Carpentras,  France,  Oct.  18,  1737 — a  black 
cloud,  London,  March  19,  1750 — violent  storm  and  a  strange  star 
of  octagonal  shape,  Slavange,  Norway,  April  15,  1752 — balls  of  fire 
from  a  streak  in  the  sky,  Augermannland,  1752 — numerous  meteor- 
ites, Lisbon,  Oct.  15,  1755 — "terrible  tempests"  over  and  over — 
"falls  of  hail"  and  "brilliant  meteors,"  instance  after  instance — "an 
immense  globe,"  Switzerland,  Nov.  2,  1761 — oblong,  sulphurous 
cloud,  Germany,  April,  1767 — extraordinary  mass  of  vapor,  Bo- 
logne,  April,  1780 — heavens  obscured  by  a  dark  mist,  Grenada, 
Aug.  7,  1804 — "strange,  howling  noises  in  the  air,  and  large  spots 
obscuring  the  sun,"  Palermo,  Italy,  April  16,  1817 — "luminous 
meteor  moving  in  the  same  direction  as  the  shock,"  Naples,  Nov. 
22,  1821 — fire  ball  appearing  in  the  sky:  apparent  size  of  the  moon, 
Thuringerwald,  Nov.  29,  1831. 

And,  unless  you  be  polarized  by  the  New  Dominant,  which  is 
calling  for  recognition  of  multiplicities  of  external  things,  as  a  Dom- 
inant, dawning  new  over  Europe  in  1492,  called  for  recognition  of 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  229 

terrestrial  externality  to  Europe — unless  you  have  this  contact  with 
the  new,  you  have  no  affinity  for  these  data — beans  that  drop  from 
a  magnet — irreconcilables  that  glide  from  the  mind  of  a  Thom- 

Or  my  own  acceptance  that  we  do  not  really  think  at  all;  that 
we  correlate  around  super-magnets  that  I  call  Dominants — a 
Spiritual  Dominant  in  one  age,  and  responsively  to  it  up  spring 
monasteries,  and  the  stake  and  the  cross  are  its  symbols:  a  Material- 
ist Dominant,  and  up  spring  laboratories,  and  microscopes  and  tele- 
scopes and  crucibles  are  its  ikons — that  we're  nothing  but  iron  filings 
relatively  to  a  succession  of  magnets  that  displace  preceding 
magnets. 

With  no  soul  of  your  own,  and  with  no  soul  of  my  own — except 
that  some  day  some  of  us  may  no  longer  be  Intermediatisms,  but 
may  hold  out  against  the  cosmos  that  once  upon  a  time  thousands 
of  fishes  were  cast  from  one  pail  of  water — we  have  psycho-valency 
for  these  data,  if  we're  obedient  slaves  to  the  New  Dominant,  and 
repulsion  to  them,  if  we're  mere  correlates  to  the  Old  Dominant. 
I'm  a  soulless  and  selfless  correlate  to  the  New  Dominant,  myself: 
I  see  what  I  have  to  see.  The  only  inducement  I  can  hold  out,  in 
my  attempt  to  rake  up  disciples,  is  that  some  day  the  New  will  be 
fashionable:  the  new  correlates  will  sneer  at  the  old  correlates. 
After  all,  there  is  some  inducement  to  that — and  I'm  not  altogether 
sure  it's  desirable  to  end  up  as  a  fixed  star. 

As  a  correlate  to  the  New  Dominant,  I  am  very  much  impressed 
with  some  of  these  data — the  luminous  object  that  moved  in  the 
same  direction  as  an  earthquake — it  seems  very  acceptable  that  a 
quake  followed  this  thing  as  it  passed  near  this  earth's  surface. 
The  streak  that  was  seen  in  the  sky — or  only  a  streak  that  was 
visible  of  another  world — and  objects,  or  meteorites,  that  were 
shaken  down  from  it.  The  quake  at  Carpentras,  France:  and  that, 
above  Carpentras,  was  a  smaller  world,  more  violently  quaked,  so 
that  earth  was  shaken  down  from  it. 

But  I  like  best  the  super-wolves  that  were  seen  to  cross  the  sun, 
during  the  earthquake  at  Palermo. 

They  howled. 

Or  the  loves  of  the  worlds.  The  call  they  feel  for  one  another. 
They  try  to  move  closer  and  howl  when  they  get  there. 

The  howls  of  the  planets. 

I  have  discovered  a  new  unintelligibility. 

In  the  Edinburgh  New  Philosophical  Journal — have  to  go  away 


* 
230  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

back  to  1841 — days  of  less  efficient  strangulation — Sir  David  Milne 
lists  phenomena  of  quakes  in  Great  Britain.  I  pick  out  a  few  that 
indicate  to  me  that  other  worlds  were  near  this  earth's  surface: 

Violent  storm  before  a  shock  of  1703 — ball  of  fire  "preceding," 
1750 — a  large  ball  of  fire  seen  upon  day  following  a  quake,  1755 — 
"uncommon  phenomenon  in  the  air:  a  large  luminous  body,  bent 
like  a  crescent,  which  stretched  itself  over  the  heavens,  1816 — vast 
ball  of  fire,  1750 — black  rains  and  black  snows,  1755 — numerous 
instances  of  upward  projection — or  upward  attraction? — during 
quakes — "preceded  by  a  cloud,  very  black  and  lowering,"  1795 — 
fall  of  black  powder,  preceding  a  quake,  by  six  hours,  1837. 

Some  of  these  instances  seem  to  me  to  be  very  striking — a  smaller 
world:  it  is  greatly  racked  by  the  attraction  of  this  earth — black 
substance  is  torn  down  from  it — not  until  six  hours  later,  after  an 
approach  still  closer,  does  this  earth  suffer  perturbation.  As  to  the 
extraordinary  spectacle  of  a  thing,  world,  super-construction,  that 
was  seen  in  the  sky,  in  1816,  I  have  not  yet  been  able  to  find  out 
more.  I  think  that  here  our  acceptance  is  relatively  sound:  that 
this  occurrence  was  tremendously  of  more  importance  than  such 
occurrence  as,  say,  transits  of  Venus,  upon  which  hundreds  of 
papers  have  been  written — that  not  another  mention  have  I  found, 
though  I  have  not  looked  so  especially  as  I  shall  look  for  more  data 
— that  all  but  undetailed  record  of  this  occurrence  was  suppressed. 

Altogether  we  have  considerable  agreement  here  between  data  of 
vast  masses  that  do  not  fall  to  this  earth,  but  from  which  substances 
fall,  and  data  of  fields  of  ice  from  which  ice  may  not  fall,  but  from 
which  water  may  drip.  I'm  beginning  to  modify:  that,  at  a  distance 
from  this  earth,  gravitation  has  more  effect  than  we  have  supposed, 
though  less  effect  than  the  dogmatists  suppose  and  "prove."  I'm 
coming  out  stronger  for  the  acceptance  of  a  Neutral  Zone — that  this 
earth,  like  other  magnets,  has  a  neutral  zone,  in  which  is  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea,  and  in  which  other  worlds  may  be  buoyed  up,  though 
projecting  parts  may  be  subject  to  this  earth's  attraction 

But  my  preference: 

Here  are  the  data. 

I  now  have  one  of  the  most  interesting  of  the  new  correlates.  I 
think  I  should  have  brought  it  in  before,  but,  whether  out  of  place 
here,  because  not  accompanied  by  earthquake,  or  not,  we'll  have  it. 
I  offer  it  as  an  instance  of  an  eclipse,  by  a  vast,  dark  body,  that  has 
been  seen  and  reported  by  an  astronomer.  The  astronomer  is  M. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  231 

Lias:  the  phenomenon  was  seen  by  him,  at  Pernambuco,  April  n, 
1860. 

Comptes  Rendus,  50-1197: 

It  was  about  noon — sky  cloudless — suddenly  the  light  of  the  sun 
was  diminished.  The  darkness  increased,  and, .  to  illustrate  its  in- 
tensity, we  are  told  that  the  planet  Venus  shone  brilliant.  But 
Venus  was  of  low  visibility  at  this  time.  The  observation  that  burns 
incense  to  the  New  Dominant  is: 

That  around  the  sun  appeared  a  corona. 

There  are  many  other  instances  that  indicate  proximity  of  other 
worlds  during  earthquakes.  I  note  a  few — quake  and  an  object  in 
the  sky,  called  "a  large,  luminous  meteor"  (Quar.  Jour.  Roy.  Inst., 
5-132);  luminous  body  in  the  sky,  earthquake,  and  fall  of  sand, 
Italy,  Feb.  12  and  13,  1870  (La  Science  Pour  Tous,  15-159);  many 
reports  upon  luminous  object  in  the  sky  and  earthquake,  Connecti- 
cut, Feb.  27,  1883  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  Feb.,  1883);  lu- 
minous object,  or  meteor,  in  the  sky,  fall  of  stones  from  the  sky, 
and  earthquake,  Italy,  Jan.  20,  1891  (L'Astronomie,  1891-154); 
earthquake  and  prodigious  number  of  luminous  bodies,  or  globes,  in 
the  air,  Boulogne,  France,  June  7,  1779  (Sestier,  "La  Foudre" 
1-169) ;  earthquake  at  Manila,  1863,  and  "curious  luminous  appear- 
ance in  the  sky,"  (Ponton,  "Earthquakes,"  p.  124). 

The  most  notable  appearance  of  fishes  during  an  earthquake  is 
that  of  Riobamba.  Humboldt  sketched  one  of  them,  and  it's  an 
uncanny-looking  thing.  Thousands  of  them  appeared  upon  the 
ground  during  this  tremendous  earthquake.  Humboldt  says  that 
they  were  cast  up  from  subterranean  sources.  I  think  not  myself, 
and  have  data  for  thinking  not,  but  there'd  be  such  a  row  arguing 
back  and  forth  that  it's  simpler  to  consider  a  clearer  instance  of  the 
fall  of  living  fishes  from  the  sky,  during  an  earthquake.  I  can't 
quite  accept,  myself,  whether  a  large  lake,  and  all  the  fishes  in  it, 
was  torn  down  from  some  other  world,  or  a  lake  in  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea,  distracted  between  two  pulling  worlds,  was  dragged 
down  to  this  earth 

Here  are  the  data: 

La  Science  Pour  Tous,  6-191: 

Feb.  1 6,  1 86 1.  An  earthquake  at  Singapore.  Then  came  an 
extraordinary  downpour  of  rain — or  as  much  water  as  any  good- 
sized  lake  would  consist  of.  For  three  days  this  rain  or  this  fall  of 
water  came  down  in  torrents.  In  pools  on  the  ground,  formed  by 
this  deluge,  great  numbers  of  fishes  were  found.  The  writer  says 


232  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

that  he  had,  himself,  seen  nothing  but  water  fall  from  the  sky. 
Whether  I'm  emphasizing  what  a  deluge  it  was  or  not,  he  says  that 
so  terrific  had  been  the  downpour  that  he  had  not  been  able  to  see 
three  steps  away  from  him.  The  natives  said  that  the  fishes  had 
fallen  from  the  sky.  Three  days  later  the  pools  dried  up  and  many 
dead  fishes  were  found,  but,  in  the  first  place — though  that's  an 
expression  for  which  we  have  an  instinctive  dislike — the  fishes  had 
been  active  and  uninjured.  Then  follows  material  for  another  of 
our  little  studies  in  the  phenomena  of  disregard.  A  psycho-tropism 
here  is  mechanically  to  take  pen  in  hand  and  mechanically  write 
that  fishes  found  on  the  ground  after  a  heavy  rainfall  came  from 
overflowing  streams.  The  writer  of  the  account  says  that  some  of 
the  fishes  had  been  found  in  his  courtyard,  which  was  surrounded 
by  high  walls — paying  no  attention  to  this,  a  correspondent  (La 
Science  Pour  Tous,  6-317)  explains  that  in  the  heavy  rain  a  body 
of  water  had  probably  overflowed,  carying  fishes  with  it.  We  are 
told  by  the  first  writer  that  these  fishes  of  Singapore  were  of  a 
species  that  was  very  abundant  near  Singapore.  So  I  think,  myself, 
that  a  whole  lakeful  of  them  had  been  shaken  down  from  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea,  under  the  circumstances  we  have  thought  of.  How- 
ever, if  appearance  of  strange  fishes  after  an  earthquake  be  more 
pleasing  in  the  sight,  or  to  the  nostrils,  of  the  New  Dominant,  we 
faithfully  and  piously  supply  that  incense — An  account  of  the  oc- 
currence at  Singapore  was  read  by  M.  de  Castelnau,  before  the 
French  Academy.  M.  de  Castelnau  recalled  that,  upon  a  former 
occasion,  he  had  submitted  to  the  Academy  the  circumstance  that 
fishes  of  a  new  species  had  appeared  at  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope, 
after  an  earthquake. 

It  seems  proper,  and  it  will  give  luster  to  the  new  orthodoxy,  now 
to  have  an  instance  in  which,  not  merely  quake  and  fall  of  rocks,  or 
meteorites,  or  quake  and  either  eclipse  or  luminous  appearances  in 
the  sky  have  occurred,  but  in  which  are  combined  all  the  phenomena, 
one  or  more  of  which,  when  accompanying  earthquake,  indicate,  in 
our  acceptance,  the  proximity  of  another  world.  This  time  a  longer 
duration  is  indicated  than  in  other  instances. 

In  the  Canadian  Institute  Proceedings,  2-7-198,  there  is  an  ac- 
count, by  the  Deputy  Commissioner  at  Dhurmsalla,  of  the  extraor-' 
dinary  Dhurmsalla  meteorite — coated  with  ice.  But  the  combina- 
tion of  events  related  by  him  is  still  more  extraordinary: 

That  within  a  few  months  of  the  fall  of  this  meteorite  there  had 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  233 

been  a  fall  of  live  fishes  at  Benares,  a  shower  of  red  substance  at 
Furruckabad,  a  dark  spot  observed  on  the  disk  of  the  sun,  an  earth- 
quake, "an  unnatural  darkness  of  some  duration,"  and  a  luminous 
appearance  in  the  sky  that  looked  like  an  aurora  borealis • 

But  there's  more  to  this  climax: 

We  are  introduced  to  a  new  order  of  phenomena: 

Visitors. 

The  Deputy  Commissioner  writes  that,  in  the  evening,  after  the 
fall  of  the  Dhurmsalla  meteorite,  or  mass  of  stone  covered  with  ice, 
he  saw  lights.  Some  of  them  were  not  very  high.  They  appeared 
and  went  out  and  reappeared.  I  have  read  many  accounts  of  the 
Dhurmsalla  meteorite — July  28,  1860 — but  never  in  any  other  of 
them  a  mention  of  this  new  correlate — something  as  out  of  place  in 
the  nineteenth  century  as  would  have  been  an  aeroplane — the  inven- 
tion of  which  would  not,  in  our  acceptance,  have  been  permitted, 
in  the  nineteenth  century,  though  adumbrations  to  it  were  per- 
mitted. This  writer  says  that  the  lights  moved  like  fire  balloons, 
but: 

"I  am  sure  that  they  were  neither  fire  balloons,  lanterns,  nor  bon- 
fires, or  any  other  thing  of  that  sort,  but  bona  fide  lights  in  the 
heavens." 

It's  a  subject  for  which  we  shall  have  to  have  a  separate  expres- 
sion— trespassers  upon  territory  to  which  something  else  has  a  legal 
right — perhaps  someone  lost  a  rock,  and  he  and  his  friends  came 
down  looking  for  it,  in  the  evening — or  secret  agents,  or  emissaries, 
who  had  an  appointment  with  certain  esoteric  ones  near  Dhurm- 
salla— things  or  beings  coming  down  to  explore,  and  unable  to  stay 
down  long 

In  a  way,  another  strange  occurrence  during  an  earthquake  is 
suggested.  The  ancient  Chinese  tradition — the  marks  like  hoof 
marks  in  the  ground.  We  have  thought — with  a  low  degree  of 
acceptance — of  another  world  that  may  be  in  secret  communication 
with  certain  esoteric  ones  of  this  earth's  inhabitants — and  of  mes- 
sages in  symbols  like  hoof  marks  that  are  sent  to  some  receptor,  or 
special  hill,  upon  this  earth — and  of  messages  that  at  times  mis- 
carry. 

•  This  other  world  comes  close  to  this  world — there  are  quakes — 
but  advantage  of  proximity  is  taken,  to  send  a  message — the  mes- 
sage, designed  for  a  receptor,  in  India,  perhaps,  or  in  Central 
Europe,  miscarries  all  the  way  to  England — marks  like  the  marks 


234  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

of  the  Chinese  tradition  are  found  upon  a  beach,  in  Cornwall,  after 
an  earthquake 

Phil.  Trans.,  50-500: 

After  the  quake  of  July  15,  1757,  upon  the  sands  of  Penzance, 
Cornwall,  in  an  area  of  more  than  100  square  yards,  were  found 
marks  like  hoof  prints,  except  that  they  were  not  crescentic.  We 
feel  a  similarity,  but  note  an  arbitrary  disregard  of  our  own,  this 
time.  It  seems  to  us  that  marks  described  as  "little  cones  sur- 
rounded by  basins  of  equal  diameter"  would  be  like  hoof  prints,  if 
hoofs  printed  complete  circles.  Other  disregards  are  that  there  were 
black  specks  on  the  tops  of  cones,  as  if  something,  perhaps  gaseous, 
had  issued  from  them;  that  from  one  of  these  formations  came  a 
gush  of  water  as  thick  as  a  man's  wrist.  Of  course  the  opening  of 
springs  is  common  in  earthquakes — but  we  suspect,  myself,  that  the 
Negative  Absolute  is  compelling  us  to  put  in  this  datum  and  its 
disorders. 

There's  another  matter  in  which  the  Negative  Absolute  seems  to 
work  against  us.  Though  to  super-chemistry,  we  have  introduced 
the  principle  of  celestio-metathesis,  we  have  no  good  data  of  ex- 
change of  substances  during  proximities.  The  data  are  all  of  falls 
and  not  of  upward  translations.  Of  course  upward  impulses  are 
common  during  earthquakes,  but  I  haven't  a  datum  upon  a  tree  or 
a  fish  or  a  brick  or  a  man  that  ever  did  go  up  and  stay  up  and  that 
never  did  come  down  again.  Our  classic  of  the  horse  and  barn 
occurred  in  what  was  called  a  whirlwind. 

It  is  said  that,  in  an  earthquake  in  Calabria,  paving  stones  shot 
up  far  in  the  air. 

The  writer  doesn't  specifically  say  that  they  came  down  again,  but 
something  seems  to  tell  me  they  did. 

The  corpses  of  Riobamba. 

Humboldt  reported  that,  in  the  quake  of  Riobamba,  "bodies  were 
torn  upward  from  graves";  that  "the  vertical  motion  was  so  strong 
that  bodies  were  tossed  several  hundred  feet  in  the  air." 

I  explain. 

I  explain  that,  if  in  the  center  of  greatest  violence  of  an  earth- 
quake, anything  ever  has  gone  up,  and  has  kept  on  going  up,  the 
thoughts  of  the  nearest  observers  were  very  likely  upon  other 
subjects. 

The  quay  of  Lisbon. 

We  are  told  that  it  went  down. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  235 

A  vast  throng  of  persons  ran  to  the  quay  for  refuge.  The  city 
of  Lisbon  was  in  profound  darkness.  The  quay  and  all  the  people 
on  it  disappeared.  If  it  and  they  went  down — not  a  single  corpse, 
not  a  shred  of  clothing,  not  a  plank  of  the  quay,  nor  so  much  as  a 
splinter  of  it  ever  floated  to  the  surface. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  New  Dominant. 
I  mean  "primarily"  all  that  opposes  Exclusionism 

That  Development  or  Progress  or  Evolution  is  Attempt  to  Posi- 
tivize,  and  is  a  mechanism  by  which  a  positive  existence  is  recruited 
— that  what  we  call  existence  is  the  womb  of  infinitude,  and  is  itself 
only  incubatory — that  eventually  all  attempts  are  broken  down  by 
the  falsely  excluded.  Subjectively,  the  breaking  down  is  aided  by 
our  own  sense  of  false  and  narrow  limitations.  So  the  classic  and 
academic  artists  wrought  positivist  paintings,  and  expressed  the 
only  ideal  that  I  am  conscious  of,  though  we  so  often  hear  of 
"ideals"  instead  of  different  manifestations,  artistically,  scientifi- 
cally, theologically,  politically,  of  the  One  Ideal.  They  sought  to 
satisfy,  in  its  artistic  aspect,  cosmic  craving  for  unity  or  completeness, 
sometimes  called  harmony,  called  beauty  in  some  aspects.  By  disre- 
gard they  sought  completeness.  But  the  light-effects  that  they  disre- 
garded, and  their  narrow  confinement  to  standardized  subjects 
brought  on  the  revolt  of  the  Impressionists.  So  the  Puritans  tried  to 
systematize,  and  they  disregarded  physical  needs,  or  vices,  or  relaxa- 
tions: they  were  invaded  and  overthrown  when  their  narrowness  be- 
came obvious  and  intolerable.  All  things  strive  for  positiveness,  for 
themselves,  or  for  quasi-systems  of  which  they  are  parts.  Formality 
and  the  mathematic,  the  regular  and  the  uniform  are  aspects  of  the 
positive  state — but  the  Positive  is  the  Universal — so  all  attempted 
positiveness  that  seems  to  satisfy  in  the  aspects  of  formality  and 
regularity,  sooner  or  later  disqualifies  in  the  aspect  of  wideness  or 
universalness.  So  there  is  revolt  against  the  science  of  to-day,  be- 
cause the  formulated  utterances  that  were  regarded  as  final  truths 
in  a  past  generation,  are  now  seen  to  be  insufficiencies.  Every 
pronouncement  that  has  opposed  our  own  acceptances  has  beea 
found  to  be  a  composition  like  any  academic  painting:  something 
that  is  arbitrarily  cut  off  from  relations  with  environment,  or  framed 
off  from  interfering  and  disturbing  data,  or  outlined  with  disregards. 
Our  own  attempt  has  been  to  take  in  the  included,  but  also  to  take 
in  the  excluded  into  wider  expressions.  We  accept,  however,  that 

236 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  237 

for  every  one  of  our  expressions  there  are  irreconcilables  somewhere — 
that  final  utterance  would  include  all  things.  However,  of  such  is 
the  gossip  of  angels.  The  final  is  unutterable  in  quasi-existence, 
where  to  think  is  to  include  butfklso  to  exclude,  or  be  not  final.  If 
we  admit  that  for  every  opinion  we  have  expressed,  there  must 
somewhere  be  an  irreconcilable,  we  are  Intermediatists  and  not 
positivists;  not  even  higher  positivists.  Of  course  it  may  be  that 
some  day  we  shall  systematize  and  dogmatize  and  refuse  to  think 
of  anything  that  we  may  be  accused  of  disregarding,  and  believe 
instead  of  merely  accepting:  then,  if  we  could  have  a  wider  system, 
which  would  acknowledge  no  irreconcilables  we'd  be  higher  posi- 
tivists. So  long  as  we  only  accept,  we  are  not  higher  positivists, 
but  our  feeling  is  that  the  New  Dominant,  even  though  we  have 
thought  of  it  only  as  another  enslavement,  will  be  the  nucleus  for 
higher  positivism — and  that  it  will  be  the  means  of  elevating  into 
infinitude  a  new  batch  of  fixed  stars — until,  as  a  recruiting  instru- 
ment, it,  too,  will  play  out,  and  will  give  way  to  some  new  medium 
for  generating  absoluteness.  It  is  our  acceptance  that  all  astron- 
omers of  to-day  have  lost  their  souls,  or,  rather,  all  chance  of  at- 
taining Entity,  but  that  Copernicus  and  Kepler  and  Galileo  and 
Newton,  and,  conceivably,  Leverrier  are  now  fixed  stars.  Some  day 
I  shall  attempt  to  identify  them.  In  all  this,  I  think  we're  quite  a 
Moses.  We  point  out  the  Promised  Land,  but,  unless  we  be  cured 
of  our  Intermediatism,  will  never  be  reported  in  Monthly  Notices, 
ourself. 

In  our  acceptance,  Dominants,  in  their  succession,  displace  pre- 
ceding Dominants  not  only  because  they  are  more  nearly  positive, 
but  because  the  old  Dominants,  as  recruiting  mediums,  play  out. 
Our  expression  is  that  the  New  Dominant,  of  Wider  Inclusions,  is 
now  manifesting  throughout  the  world,  and  that  the  old  Exclusion- 
ism  is  everywhere  breaking  down.  In  physics  Exclusionism  is  break- 
ing down  by  its  own  researches  in  radium,  for  instance,  and  in  its 
speculations  upon  electrons,  or  its  merging  away  into  metaphysics, 
and  by  the  desertion  that  has  been  going  on  for  many  years,  by 
such  men  as  Gurney,  Crookes,  Wallace,  Flammarion,  Lodge,  to 
formerly  disregarded  phenomena — no  longer  called  "spiritualism" 
but  now  "psychic  research."  Biology  is  in  chaos:  conventional  Dar- 
winites  mixed  up  with  mutationists  and  orthogenesists  and  follow- 
ers of  Wisemann,  who  take  from  Darwinism  one  of  its  pseudo-bases, 
and  nevertheless  try  to  reconcile  their  heresies  with  orthodoxy.  The 
painters  are  metaphysicians  and  psychologists.  The  breaking  down 


238  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

of  Exclusionism  in  China  and  Japan  and  in  the  United  States  has 
astonished  History.  The  science  of  astronomy  is  going  downward 
so  that,  though  Pickering,  for  instance,  did  speculate  upon  a  Trans- 
Neptunian  planet,  and  Lowell  did  try  to  have  accepted  heretical 
ideas  as  to  marks  on  Mars,  attention  is  now  minutely  focussed  upon 
such  technicalities  as  variations  in  shades  of  Jupiter's  fourth  satel- 
lite. I  think  that,  in  general  acceptance,  over-refinement  indicates 
decadence. 

I  think  that  the  stronghold  of  Inclusionism  is  in  aeronautics.  I 
think  that  the  stronghold  of  the  Old  Dominant,  when  it  was  new, 
was  in  the  invention  of  the  telescope.  Or  that,  coincidentally  with 
the  breakdown  of  Exclusionism  appears  the  means  of  finding  out — 
whether  there  are  vast  aerial  fields  of  ice  and  floating  lakes  full  of 
frogs  and  fishes  or  not — where  carved  stones  and  black  substances 
and  great  quantities  of  vegetable  matter  and  flesh,  which  may  be 
dragons'  flesh,  come  from — whether  there  are  inter-planetary  trade 
routes  and  vast  areas  devastated  by  Super-Tamerlanes — whether 
sometimes  there  are  visitors  to  this  earth — who  might  be  pursued 
and  captured  and  questioned. 


i 


CHAPTER  XIX 

HAVE  industriously  sought  data  for  an  expression  upon  birds, 
—  but  the  prospecting  has  not  been  very  quasi-satisfactory.  I 
think  I  rather  emphasize  our  industriousness,  because  a  charge  likely 
to  be  brought  against  the  attitude  of  Acceptance  is  that  one  who 
only  accepts  must  be  one  of  languid  interest  and  little  application  of 
energy.  It  doesn't  seem  to  work  out:  we  are  very  industrious, 
suggest  to  some  of  our  disciples  that  they  look  into  the  matter  of 
,  messages  upon  pigeons,  of  course  attributed  to  earthly  owners,  but 
i  said  to  be  undecipherable.  I'd  do  it,  ourselves,  only  that  would  be 
selfish.  That's  more  of  the  Intermediatism  that  will  keep  us  out 
of  the  firmament:  Positivism  is  absolute  egoism.  But  look  back  in 
the  time  of  Andree's  Polar  Expedition.  Pigeons  that  would  have 
no  publicity  ordinarily,  were  often  reported  at  that  time. 

In  the  Zoologist,  3-18-21,  is  recorded  an  instance  of  a  bird  (puffin) 
that  had  fallen  to  the  ground  with  a  fractured  head.  Interesting, 
but  mere  speculation— but  what  solid  object,  high  in  the  air,  had 
that  bird  struck  against? 

Tremendous  red  rain  in  France,  Oct.  16  and  17,  1846;  great 
storm  at  the  time,  and  red  rain  supposed  to  have  been  colored  by 
matter  swept  up  from  this  earth's  surface,  and  then  precipitated 
(Comptes  Rendus,  23-832).  But  in  Comptes  Rendus,  24-625, 
the  description  of  this  red  rain  differs  from  one's  impression  of  red, 
sandy  or  muddy  water.  It  is  said  that  this  rain  was  so  vividly  red 
and  so  blood-like  that  many  persons  in  France  were  terrified.  Two 
analyses  are  given  (Comptes  Rendus,  24-812).  One  chemist  notes 
a  great  quantity  of  corpuscles— whether  blood-like  corpuscles  or  not 
—in  the  matter.  The  other  chemist  sets  down  organic  matter  at  35 
per  cent.  It  may  be  that  an  inter-planetary  dragon  had  been  slain 
somewhere,  or  that  this  red  fluid,  in  which  were  many  corpuscles, 
came  from  something  not  altogether  pleasant  to  contemplate,  about 
the  size  of  the  Catskill  Mountains,  perhaps— but  the  present  datum 
is  that  with  this  substance,  larks,  quail,  ducks,  and  water  hens,  some 
of  them  alive,  fell  at  Lyons  and  Grenoble  and  other  places. 
I  have  notes  upon  other  birds  that  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  but 

239 


240  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

unaccompanied  by  the  red  rain  that  makes  the  fall  of  birds  in 
France  peculiar,  and  very  peculiar,  if  it  be  accepted  that  the  red 
substance  was  extra-mundane.  The  other  notes  are  upon  birds  that 
have  fallen  from  the  sky,  in  the  midst  of  storms,  or  of  exhausted, 
but  living,  birds,  falling  not  far  from  a  storm-area.  But  now  we 
shall  have  an  instance  for  which  I  can  find  no  parallel:  fall  of  dead 
birds,  from  a  clear  sky,  far-distant  from  any  storm  to  which  they 
could  be  attributed — so  remote  from  any  discoverable  storm 
that 

My  own  notion  is  that,  in  the  summer  of  1896,  something,  or 
some  beings,  came  as  near  to  this  earth  as  they  could,  upon  a  hunt- 
ing expedition;  that,  in  the  summer  of  1896,  an  expedition  of  super- 
scientists  passed  over  this  earth,  and  let  down  a  dragnet — and  what 
would  it  catch,  sweeping  through  the  air,  supposing  it  to  have 
reached  not  quite  to  this  earth? 

In  the  Monthly  Weather  Review,  May,  1917,  W.  L.  McAtee 
quotes  from  the  Baton  Rouge  correspondence  to  the  Philadelphia 
Times: 

That,  in  the  summer  of  1896,  into  the  streets  of  Baton  Rouge, 
La.,  and  from  a  "clear  sky,"  fell  hundreds  of  dead  birds.  There 
were  wild  ducks  and  cat  birds,  woodpeckers,  and  "many  birds  of 
strange  plumage,"  some  of  them  resembling  canaries. 

Usually  one  does  not  have  to  look  very  far  from  any  place  to 
learn  of  a  storm.  But  the  best  that  could  be  done  in  this  instance 
was  to  say: 

"There  had  been  a  storm  on  the  coast  of  Florida." 

And,  unless  he  have  psycho-chemic  repulsion  for  the  explanation, 
the  reader  feels  only  momentary  astonishment  that  dead  birds  from 
a  storm  in  Florida  should  fall  from  an  unstormy  sky  in  Louisiana, 
and  with  his  intellect  greased  like  the  plumage  of  a  wild  duck,  the 
datum  then  drops  oft. 

Our  greasy,  shiny  brains.  That  they  may  be  of  some  use  after 
all:  that  other  modes  of  existence  place  a  high  value  upon  them  as 
lubricants;  that  we're  hunted  for  them;  a  hunting  expedition  to  this 
earth — the  newspapers  report  a  tornado. 

If  from  a  clear  sky,  or  a  sky  in  which  there  were  no  driven  clouds, 
or  other  evidences  of  still-continuing  wind-power — or,  if  from  a 
storm  in  Florida,  it  could  be  accepted  that  hundreds  of  birds  had 
fallen  far  away,  in  Louisiana,  I  conceive,  conventionally,  of  heavier 
objects  having  fallen  in  Alabama,  say,  and  of  the  fall  of  still  heavier 
objects  still  nearer  the  origin  in  Florida. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  241 

The  sources  of  information  of  the  Weather  Bureau  are  wide- 
spread. 

It  has  no  records  of  such  falls. 

So  a  drag  net  that  was  let  down  from  above  somewhere 

Or  something  that  I  learned  from  the  more  scientific  of  the  in- 
vestigators of  psychic  phenomena: 

The  reader  begins  their  works  with  prejudice  against  telepathy 
and  everything  else  of  psychic  phenomena.  The  writers  deny  spirit- 
communication,  and  say  that  the  seeming  data  are  data  of  "only 
telepathy."  Astonishing  instances  of  seeming  clairvoyance — "only 
telepathy."  After  a  while  the  reader  finds  himself  agreeing  that  it's 
only  telepathy — which,  at  first,  had  been  intolerable  to  him. 

So  maybe,  in  1896,  a  super-dragnet  did  not  sweep  through  this 
earth's  atmosphere,  gathering  up  all  the  birds  within  its  field,  the 
meshes  then  suddenly  breaking 

Or  that  the  birds  of  Baton  Rouge  were  only  from  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea 

Upon  which  we  shall  have  another  expression.  We  thought  we'd 
settled  that,  and  we  thought  we'd  established  that,  but  nothing's 
ever  settled,  and  nothing's  ever  established,  in  a  real  sense,  if,  in  a 
real  sense,  there  is  nothing  in  quasiness. 

I  suppose  there  had  been  a  storm  somewhere,  the  storm  in  Florida, 
perhaps,  and  many  birds  had  been  swept  upward  into  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea.  It  has  frigid  regions  and  it  has  tropical  regions — that 
birds  of  diverse  species  had  been  swept  upward,  into  an  icy  region, 
where,  huddling  together  for  warmth,  they  had  died.  Then,  later, 
they  had  been  dislodged — meteor  coming  along — boat — bicycle — 
dragon — don't  know  what  did  come  along — something  dislodged 
them. 

So  leaves  of  trees,  carried  up  there  in  whirlwinds,  staying  there 
years,  ages,  perhaps  only  a  few  months,  but  then  falling  to  this 
earth  at  an  unseasonable  time  for  dead  leaves — fishes  carried  up 
there,  some  of  them  dying  and  drying,  some  of  them  living  in  vol- 
umes of  water  that  are  in  abundance  up  there,  or  that  fall  some- 
times in  the  deluges  that  we  call  "cloudbursts." 

The  astronomers  won't  think  kindly  of  us,  and  we  haven't  done 
anything  to  endear  ourselves  to  the  meteorologists — but  we're  weak 
and  mawkish  Intermediatists — several  times  we've  tried  to  get  the 
aeronauts  with  us — extraordinary  things  up  there:  things  that  cura- 
tors of  museums  would  give  up  all  hope  of  ever  being  fixed  stars,  to 


242  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

obtain:  things  left  over  from  whirlwinds  of  the  time  of  the  Pharaohs, 
perhaps:  or  that  Elijah  did  go  up  in  the  sky  in  something  like  a 
chariot,  and  may  not  be  Vega,  after  all,  and  that  there  may  be  a 
wheel  or  so  left  of  whatever  he  went  up  in.  We  basely  suggest  that 
it  would  bring  a  high  price — but  sell  soon,  because  after  a  while 
there'd  be  thousands  of  them  hawked  around 

We  weakly  drop  a  hint  to  the  aeronauts. 

In  the  Scientific  American,  33-197,  there  is  an  account  of  some 
hay  that  fell  from  the  sky.  From  the  circumstances  we  incline  to 
accept  that  this  hay  went  up,  in  a  whirlwind,  from  this  earth,  in 
the  first  place,  reached  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  and  remained  there 
a  long  time  before  falling.  An  interesting  point  in  this  expression 
is  the  usual  attribution  to  a  local  and  coinciding  whirlwind,  and 
identification  of  it — and  then  data  that  make  that  local  whirlwind 
unacceptable 

That,  upon  July  27,  1875,  small  masses  of  damp  hay  had  fallen 
at  Monkstown,  Ireland.  In  the  Dublin  Daily  Express,  Dr.  J.  W. 
Moore  had  explained:  he  had  found  a  nearby  whirlwind,  to  the  south 
of  Monkstown,  that  coincided.  But,  according  to  the  Scientific 
American,  a  similar  fall  had  occurred  near  Wrexham,  England,  two 
days  before. 

In  November,  1918,  I  made  some  studies  upon  light  objects 
thrown  into  the  air.  Armistice-day.  I  suppose  I  should  have  been 
more  emotionally  occupied,  but  I  made  notes  upon  torn-up  papers 
thrown  high  in  the  air  from  windows  of  office  buildings.  Scraps  of 
paper  did  stay  together  for  a  while.  Several  minutes,  sometimes. 

Cosmos,  3-4-574: 

That,  upon  the  loth  of  April,  1869,  at  Autriche  (Indre-et-Loire) 
a  great  number  of  oak  leaves — enormous  segregation  of  them — fell 
from  the  sky.  Very  calm  day.  So  little  wind  that  the  leaves  fell 
almost  vertically.  Fall  lasted  about  ten  minutes. 

Flammarion,  in  "The  Atmosphere"  p.  412,  tells  this  story. 

He  has  to  find  a  storm. 

He  does  find  a  squall — but  it  had  occurred  upon  April  3rd. 

Flammarion's  two  incredibilities  are — that  leaves  could  remain  a 
week  in  the  air:  that  they  could  stay  together  a  week  in  the  air. 

Think  of  some  of  your  own  observations  upon  papers  .thrown 
from  an  aeroplane. 

Our  one  incredibility: 

That  these  leaves  had  been  whirled  up  six  months  before,  when 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  243 

they  were  common  on  the  ground,  and  had  been  sustained,  of  course 
not  in  the  air,  but  in  a  region  gravitationally  inert;  and  had  been 
precipitated  by  the  disturbances  of  April  rains. 

I  have  no  records  of  leaves  that  have  so  fallen  from  the  sky,  in 
October  or  November,  the  season  when  one  might  expect  dead  leaves 
to  be  raised  from  one  place  and  precipitated  somewhere  else.  I  em- 
phasize that  this  occurred  in  April. 

La  Nature,  1889-2-94: 

That,  upon  April  19,  1889,  dried  leaves,  of  different  species,  oak, 
elm,  etc.,  fell  from  the  sky.  This  day,  too,  was  a  calm  day.  The 
fall  was  tremendous.  The  leaves  were  seen  to  fall  fifteen  minutes, 
but,  judging  from  the  quantity  on  the  ground,  it  is  the  writer's 
opinion  that  they  had  already  been  falling  half  an  hour.  I  think 
that  the  geyser  of  corpses  that  sprang  from  Riobamba  toward  the 
sky  must  have  been  an  interesting  sight.  If  I  were  a  painter,  I'd 
like  that  subject.  But  this  cataract  of  dried  leaves,  too,  is  a  study 
in  the  rhythms  of  the  dead.  In  this  datum,  the  point  most  agree- 
able to  us  is  the  very  point  that  the  writer  in  La  Nature  empha- 
sizes. Windlessness.  He  says  that  the  surface  of  the  Loire  was 
"absolutely  smooth."  The  river  was  strewn  with  leaves  as  far  as 
he  could  see. 

L'Astronomie,  1894-194: 

That,  upon  the  yth  of  April,  1894,  dried  leaves  fell  at  Clairvaux 
and  Outre- Aube,  France.  The  fall  is  described  as  prodigious.  Half 
an  hour.  Then,  upon  the  nth,  a  fall  of  dried  leaves  occurred  at 
Pontcarre. 

It  is  in  this  recurrence  that  we  found  some  of  our  opposition  to 
the  conventional  explanation.  The  Editor  (Flammarion)  explains. 
He  says  that  the  leaves  had  been  caught  up  in  a  cyclone  which  had 
expended  its  force;  that  the  heavier  leaves  had  fallen  first.  We 
think  that  that  was  all  right  for  1894,  and  that  it  was  quite  good 
enough  for  1894.  But,  in  these  more  exacting  days,  we  want  to 
know  how  wind-power  insufficient  to  hold  some  leaves  in  the  air 
could  sustain  others  four  days. 

The  factors  in  this  expression  are  unseasonableness,  not  for  dried 
leaves,  but  for  prodigious  numbers  of  dried  leaves;  direct  fall,  wind- 
lessness,  month  of  April,  and  localization  in  France.  The  factor  of 
localization  is  interesting.  Not  a  note  have  I  upon  fall  of  leaves 
from  the  sky,  except  these  notes.  Were  the  conventional  explana- 
tion, or  "old  correlate"  acceptable,  it  would  seem  that  similar  occur- 


244  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

rences  in  other  regions  should  be  as  frequent  as  in  France.  The  in- 
dication is  that  there  may  be  quasi-permanent  undulations  in  the 
Super-Sargasso  Sea,  or  a  pronounced  inclination  toward  France 

Inspiration: 

That  there  may  be  a  nearby  world  complementary  to  this  world, 
where  autumn  occurs  at  the  time  that  is  springtime  here. 

Let  some  disciple  have  that. 

But  there  may  be  a  dip  toward  France,  so  that  leaves  that  are 
borne  high  there,  are  more  likely  to  be  held  in  suspension  than  high- 
flying leaves  elsewhere.  Some  other  time  I  shall  take  up  Super- 
geography,  and  be  guilty  of  charts.  I  think,  now,  that  the  Super- 
Sargasso  Sea  is  an  oblique  belt,  with  changing  ramifications,  over 
Great  Britain,  France,  Italy,  and  on  to  India.  Relatively  to  the 
United  States  I  am  not  very  clear,  but  think  especially  of  the  South- 
ern States. 

The  preponderance  of  our  data  indicates  frigid  regions  aloft. 
Nevertheless  such  phenomena  as  putrefaction  have  occurred  often 
enough  to  make  super-tropical  regions,  also,  acceptable.  We  shall 
have  one  more  datum  upon  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea.  It  seems  to  me 
that,  by  this  time,  our  requirements  of  support  and  reenforcement 
and  agreement  have  been  quite  as  rigorous  for  acceptance  as  ever 
for  belief:  at  least  for  full  acceptance.  By  virtue  of  mere  accept- 
ance, we  may,  in  some  later  book,  deny  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea,  and 
find  that  our  data  relate  to  some  other  complementary  world  instead 
— or  the  moon — and  have  abundant  data  for  accepting  that  the 
moon  is  not  more  than  twenty  or  thirty  miles  away.  However,  the 
Super-Sargasso  Sea  functions  very  well  as  a  nucleus  around  which 
to  gather  data  that  oppose  Exclusionism.  That  is  our  main  motive: 
to  oppose  Exclusionism. 

Or  our  agreement  with  cosmic  processes.  The  climax  of  our 
general  expression  upon  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea.  Coincidentally 
appears  something  else  that  may  overthrow  it  later. 

Notes  and  Queries,  8:i2-228: 

That  in  the  province  of  Macerata,  Italy  (summer  of  1897?)  an 
immense  number  of  small,  blood-colored  clouds  covered  the  sky. 
About  an  hour  later  a  storm  broke,  and  myriad  seeds  fell  to  the 
ground.  It  is  said  that  they  were  identified  as  products  of  a  tree 
found  only  in  Central  Africa  and  the  Antilles. 

If — in  terms  of  conventional  reasoning — these  seeds  had  been 
high  in  the  air,  they  had  been  in  a  cold  region.  But  it  is  our  accept- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  245 

ance  that  these  seeds  had,  for  a  considerable  time,  been  in  a  warm 
region,  and  for  a  time  longer  than  is  attributable  to  suspension  by 
wind-power: 

"It  is  said  that  a  great  number  of  the  seeds  were  in  the  first  stage 
of  germination." 


CHAPTER  XX 

THE  New  Dominant. 
Inclusionism. 

In  it  we  have  a  pseudo-standard. 

We  have  a  datum,  and  we  give  it  an  interpretation,  in  accordance 
with  our  pseudo-standard.  At  present  we  have  not  the  delusions 
of  Absolutism  that  may  have  translated  some  of  the  positivists  of 
the  nineteenth  century  to  heaven.  We  are  Intermediatists — but  feel 
a  lurking  suspicion  that  we  may  some  day  solidify  and  dogmatize 
and  illiberalize  into  higher  positivists.  At  present  we  do  not  ask 
whether  something  be  reasonable  or  preposterous,  because  we  rec- 
ognize that  by  reasonableness  and  preposterousness  are  meant  agree- 
ment and  disagreement  with  a  standard — which  must  be  a  delusion 
— though  not  absolutely,  of  course — and  must  some  day  be  dis- 
placed by  a  more  advanced  quasi-delusion.  Scientists  in  the  past 
have  taken  the  positivist  attitude — is  this  or  that  reasonable  or 
unreasonable?  Analyze  them  and  we  find  that  they  meant  rela- 
tively to  a  standard,  such  as  Newtonism,  Daltonism,  Darwinism,  or 
Lyellism.  But  they  have  written  and  spoken  and  thought  as  if  they 
could  mean  real  reasonableness  and  real  unreasonableness. 

So  our  pseudo-standard  is  Inclusionism,  and,  if  a  datum  be  a 
correlate  to  a  more  widely  inclusive  outlook  as  to  this  earth  and 
its  externality  and  relations  with  externality,  its  harmony  with 
Inclusionism  admits  it.  Such  was  the  process,  and  such  was  the 
requirement  for  admission  in  the  days  of  the  Old  Dominant:  our 
difference  is  in  underlying  Intermediatism,  or  consciousness  that 
though  we're  more  nearly  real,  we  and  our  standards  are  only 
quasi 

Or  that  all  things—in  our  intermediate  state — are  phantoms  in 
a  super-mind  in  a  dreaming  state — but  striving  to  awaken  to  real- 
ness. 

Though  in  some  respects  our  own  Intermediatism  is  unsatisfac- 
tory, our  underlying  feeling  is 

That  in  a  dreaming  mind  awakening  is  accelerated — if  phantoms 
in  that  mind  know  that  they're  only  phantoms  in  a  dream.  Of 

246 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  247 

course,  they  too  are  quasi,  or — but  in  a  relative  sense — they  have 
an  essence  of  what  is  called  realness.  They  are  derived  from  expe- 
rience or  from  sense-relations,  even  though  grotesque  distortions. 
It  seems  acceptable  that  a  table  that  is  seen  when  one  is  awake 
is  more  nearly  real  than  a  dreamed  table,  which,  with  fifteen  or 
twenty  legs,  chases  one. 

So  now,  in  the  twentieth  century,  with  a  change  of  terms,  and  a 
change  in  underlying  consciousness,  our  attitude  toward  the  New 
Dominant  is  the  attitude  of  the  scientists  of  the  nineteenth  century 
to  the  Old  Dominant.  We  do  not  insist  that  our  data  and  interpre- 
tations shall  be  as  shocking,  grotesque,  evil,  ridiculous,  childish, 
insincere,  laughable,  ignorant  to  nineteenth-centuryites  as  were  their 
data  and  interpretations  to  the  medieval-minded.  We  ask  only 
whether  data  and  interpretations  correlate.  If  they  do,  they  are 
acceptable,  perhaps  only  for  a  short  time,  or  as  nuclei,  or  scaffold- 
ing, or  preliminary  sketches,  or  as  gropings  and  tentativenesses. 
Later,  of  course,  when  we  cool  off  and  harden  and  radiate  into 
space  most  of  our  present  mobility,  which  expresses  in  modesty 
and  plasticity,  we  shall  acknowledge  no  scaffoldings,  gropings  or 
tentativenesses,  but  think  we  utter  absolute  facts.  A  point  in  Inter- 
mediatism  here  is  opposed  to  most  current  speculations  upon 
Development.  Usually  one  thinks  of  the  spiritual  as  higher  than 
the  material,  but,  in  our  acceptance,  quasi-existence  is  a  means  by 
which  the  absolutely  immaterial  materializes  absolutely,  and, 
being  intermediate,  is  a  state  in  which  nothing  is  finally  either  imma- 
terial or  material,  all  objects,  substances,  thoughts,  occupying  some 
grade  of  approximation  one  way  or  the  other.  Final  solidification 
of  the  ethereal  is,  to  us,  the  goal  of  cosmic  ambition.  Positivism  is 
Puritanism.  Heat  is  Evil.  Final  Good  is  Absolute  Frigidity.  An 
Arctic  winter  is  very  beautiful,  but  I  think  that  an  interest  in 
monkeys  chattering  in  palm  trees  accounts  for  our  own  Interme- 
diatism. 

Visitors. 

Our  confusion  here,  out  of  which  we  are  attempting  to  make 
quasi-order  is  as  great  as  it  has  been  throughout  this  book,  because 
we  have  not  the  positivist's  delusion  of  homogeneity.  A  positivist 
would  gather  all  data  that  seem  to  relate  to  one  kind  of  visitors 
and  coldly  disregard  all  other  data.  I  think  of  as  many  different 
kinds  of  visitors  to  this  earth  as  there  are  visitors  to  New  York, 
to  a  jail,  to  a  church — some  persons  go  to  church  to  pick  pockets, 
for  instance. 


248  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

My  own  acceptance  is  that  either  a  world  or  a  vast  super-con- 
struction— or  a  world,  if  red  substances  and  fishes  fell  from  it- 
hovered  over  India  in  the  summer  of  1860.  Something  then  fell 
from  somewhere,  July  17,  1860,  at  Dhurmsalla.  Whatever  "it"  was, 
"it"  is  so  persistently  alluded  to  as  "a  meteorite"  that  I  look  back 
and  see  that  I  adopted  this  convention  myself.  But  in  the  London 
Times,  Dec.  26,  1860,  Syed  Abdoolah,  Professor  of  Hindustani, 
University  College,  London,  writes  that  he  had  sent  to  a  friend  in 
Dhurmsalla,  for  an  account  of  the  stones  that  had  fallen  at  that 
place.  The  answer: 

".  .  .  divers  forms  and  sizes,  many  of  which  bore  great  resem- 
blance to  ordinary  cannon  balls  just  discharged  from  engines  of 
war." 

It's  an  addition  to  our  data  of  spherical  objects  that  have 
arrived  upon  this  earth.  Note  that  they  are  spherical  stone  objects. 

And,  in  the  evening  of  this  same  day  that  something — took  a 
shot  at  Dhurmsalla — or  sent  objects  upon  which  there  may  be 
decipherable  markings — lights  were  seen  in  the  air 

I  think,  myself,  of  a  number  of  things,  beings,  whatever  they 
were,  trying  to  get  down,  but  resisted,  like  balloonists,  at  a  certain 
altitude,  trying  to  get  farther  up,  but  resisted. 

Not  in  the  least  except  to  good  positivists,  or  the  homogeneous- 
minded,  does  this-  speculation  interfere  with  the  concept  of  some 
other  world  that  is  in  successful  communication  with  certain  esoteric 
ones  upon  this  earth,  by  a  code  of  symbols  that  print  in  rock,  like 
symbols  of  telephotographers  in  selenium. 

I  think  that  sometimes,  in  favorable  circumstances,  emissaries 
have  come  to  this  earth — secret  meetings 

Of  course  it  sounds 

But: 

Secret  meetings — emissaries — esoteric  ones  in  Europe,  before  the 
war  broke  out 

And  those  who  suggested  that  such  phenomena  could  be. 

However,  as  to  most  of  our  data,  I  think  of  super-things  that 
have  passed  close  to  this  earth  with  no  more  interest  in  this  earth 
than  have  passengers  upon  a  steamship  in  the  bottom  of  the  sea — • 
or  passengers  may  have  a  keen  interest,  but  circumstances  of  sched- 
ules and  commercial  requirements  forbid  investigation  of  the  bottom 
of  the  sea. 

Then,  on  the  other  hand,  we  may  have  data  of  super-scientific 
attempts  to  investigate  phenomena  of  this  earth  from  above — 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  249 

perhaps  by  beings  from  so  far  away  that  they  had  never  even 
heard  that  something,  somewhere,  asserts  a  legal  right  to  this  earth. 

Altogether,  we're  good  intermediatists,  but  we  can't  be  very  good 
hypnotists. 

Still  another  source  of  the  merging  away  of  our  data: 

That,  upon  general  principles  of  Continuity,  if  super-vessels,  or 
super-vehicles,  have  traversed  this  earth's  atmosphere,  there  must 
be  mergers  between  them  and  terrestrial  phenomena:  observations 
upon  them  must  merge  away  into  observations  upon  clouds  and 
balloons  and  meteors.  We  shall  begin  with  data  that  we  can  not 
distinguish  ourselves  and  work  our  way  out  of  mergers  into  extremes. 

In  the  Observatory,  35-168,  it  is  said  that,  according  to  a  news- 
paper, March  6,  1912,  residents  of  Warmley,  England,  were  greatly 
excited  by  something  that  was  supposed  to  be  "a  splendidly  illumi- 
nated aeroplane,  passing  over  the  village."  "The  machine  was 
apparently  traveling  at  a  tremendous  rate,  and  came  from  thq 
direction  of  Bath,  and  went  on  toward  Gloucester."  The  Editor 
says  that  it  was  a  large,  triple-headed  fireball.  "Tremendous  in- 
deed!" he  says.  "But  we  are  prepared  for  anything  nowadays." 

That  is  satisfactory.  We'd  not  like  to  creep  up  stealthily  and 
then  jump  out  of  a  corner  with  our  data.  This  Editor,  at  least,  is 
prepared  to  read 

Nature,  Oct.  27,  1898: 

A  correspondent  writes  that,  in  the  County  Wicklow,  Ireland,  at 
about  6  o'clock  in  the  evening,  he  had  seen,  in  the  sky,  an  object 
that  looked  like  the  moon  in  its  three-quarter  aspect.  We  note  the 
shape  which  approximates  to  triangularity,  and  we  note  that  in 
color  it  is  said  to  have  been  golden  yellow.  It  moved  slowly,  and 
in  about  five  minutes  disappeared  behind  a  mountain. 

The  Editor  gives  his  opinion  that  the  object  may  have  been  an 
escaped  balloon. 

In  Nature,  Aug.  u,  1898,  there  is  a  story,  taken  from  the  July 
number  of  the  Canadian  Weather  Review,  by  the  meteorologist, 
F.  F.  Payne:  that  he  had  seen,  in  the  Canadian  sky,  a  large,  pear- 
shaped  object,  sailing  rapidly.  At  first  he  supposed  that  the  object 
was  a  balloon,  "its  outline  being  sharply  defined."  "But,  as  no 
cage  was  seen,  it  was  concluded  that  it  must  be  a  mass  of  cloud." 
In  about  six  minutes  this  object  became  less  definite — whether  be- 
cause of  increasing  distance  or  not — "the  mass  became  less  dense, 
and  finally  it  disappeared."  As  to  cyclonic  formation — "no  whirling 
motion  could  be  seen." 


250  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Nature,  58-294: 

That,  upon  July  8,  1898,  a  correspondent  had  seen,  at  Kiel,  an 
object  in  the  sky,  colored  red  by  the  sun,  which  had  set.  It  was 
about  as  broad  as  a  rainbow,  and  about  twelve  degrees  high.  "It 
remained  in  its  original  brightness  about  five  minutes,  and  then 
faded  rapidly,  and  then  remained  almost  stationary  again,  finally 
disappearing  about  eight  minutes  after  I  first  saw  it." 

In  an  intermediate  existence,  we  quasi-persons  have  nothing  to 
judge  by  because  everything  is  its  own  opposite.  If  a  hundred 
dollars  a  week  be  a  standard  of  luxurious  living  to  some  persons, 
it  is  poverty  to  others.  We  have  instances  of  three  objects  that 
were  seen  in  the  sky  in  a  space  of  three  months,  and  this  concurrence 
seems  to  me  to  be  something  to  judge  by.  Science  has  been  built 
upon  concurrence:  so  have  been  most  of  the  fallacies  and  fanati- 
cisms. I  feel  the  positivism  of  a  Leverrier,  or  instinctively  take  to 
the  notion  that  all  three  of  these  observations  relate  to  the  same 
object.  However,  I  don't  formulate  them  and  predict  the  next 
transit.  Here's  another  chance  for  me  to  become  a  fixed  star — but 
as  usual — oh,  well 

A  point  in  Intermediatism: 

That  the  Intermediatist  is  likely  to  be  a  flaccid  compromiser. 

Our  own  attitude: 

Ours  is  a  partly  positive  and  partly  negative  state,  or  a  state  in 
which  nothing  is  finally  positive  or  finally  negative 

But,  if  positivism  attract  you,  go  ahead  and  try:  you  will  be  in 
harmony  with  cosmic  endeavor — but  Continuity  will  resist  you. 
Only  to  have  appearance  in  quasiness  is  to  be  proportionately  posi- 
tive, but  beyond  a  degree  of  attempted  positivism,  Continuity  will 
rise  to  pull  you  back.  Success,  as  it  is  called — though  there  is  only 
success-failure  in  Intermediateness — will,  in  Intermediateness,  be 
yours  proportionately  as  you  are  in  adjustment  with  its  own  state, 
or  some  positivism  mixed  with  compromise  and  retreat.  To  be  very 
positive  is  to  be  a  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  against  whom  the  rest  of 
civilization  will  sooner  or  later  combine.  For  interesting  data,  see 
newspaper  accounts  of  fate  of  one  Dowie,  of  Chicago. 

Intermediatism,  then,  is  recognition  that  our  state  is  only  a  quasi- 
state:  it  is  no  bar  to  one  who  desires  to  be  positive:  it  is  recognition 
that  he  can  not  be  positive  and  remain  in  a  state  that  is  positive- 
negative.  Or  that  a  great  positivist — isolated — with  no  system  to 
support  him — will  be  crucified,  or  will  starve  to  death,  or  will  be 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  251 

put  in  jail  and  beaten  to  death — that  these  are  the  birth-pangs  of 
translation  to  the  Positive  Absolute. 

So,  though  positive-negative,  myself,  I  feel  the  attraction  of  the 
positive  pole  of  our  intermediate  state,  and  attempt  to  correlate 
these  three  data:  to  see  them  homogeneously;  to  think  that  they 
relate  to  one  object. 

In  the  aeronautic  journals,  and  in  the  London  Times  there  is  no 
mention  of  escaped  balloons,  in  the  summer  or  fall  of  1898.  In  the 
New  York  Times  there  is  no  mention  of  ballooning  in  Canada  or 
the  United  States,  in  the  summer  of  1898. 

London  Times,  Sept.  29,  1885: 

A  clipping  from  the  Royal  Gazette,  of  Bermuda,  of  Sept.  8,  1885, 
sent  to  the  Times  by  General  Lefroy: 

That,  upon  Aug.  27,  1885,  at  about  8:30  a.  m.,  there  was  ob- 
served by  Mrs.  Adelina  D.  Bassett,  "a  strange  object  in  the  clouds, 
coming  from  the  north."  She  called  the  attention  of  Mrs.  L.  Lowell 
to  it,  and  they  were  both  somewhat  alarmed.  However,  they  con- 
tinued to  watch  the  object  steadily  for  some  time.  It  drew  nearer. 
It  was  of  triangular  shape,  and  seemed  to  be  about  the  size  of  a 
pilot-boat  mainsail,  with  chains  attached  to  the  bottom  of  it.  While 
crossing  the  land  it  had  appeared  to  descend,  but,  as  it  went  out  to 
sea,  it  ascended,  and  continued  to  ascend,  until  it  was  lost  to  sight 
high  in  the  clouds. 

Or  with  such  power  to  ascend,  I  don't  think  much  myself  of  the 
notion  that  it  was  an  escaped  balloon,  partly  deflated.  Neverthe- 
less, General  Lefroy,  correlating  with  Exclusionism,  attempts  to 
give  a  terrestrial  interpretation  to  this  occurrence.  He  argues  that 
the  thing  may  have  been  a  balloon  that  had  escaped  from  France  or 
England — or  the  only  aerial  thing  of  terrestrial  origin  that,  even  to 
this  date  of  about  thirty-five  years  later,  has  been  thought  to 
have  crossed  the  Atlantic  Ocean.  He  accounts  for  the  triangular 
form  by  deflation — "a  shapeless  bag,  barely  able  to  float."  My 
own  acceptance  is  that  great  deflation  does  not  accord  with  observa- 
tions upon  its  power  to  ascend. 

In  the  Times,  Oct.  i,  1885,  Charles  Harding,  of  the  R.  M.  S., 
argues  that  if  it  had  been  a  balloon  from  Europe,  surely  it  would 
have  been  seen  and  reported  by  many  vessels.  Whether  he  was  as 
good  a  Briton  as  the  General  or  not,  he  shows  awareness  of  the 
United  States — or  that  the  thing  may  have  been  a  partly  collapsed 
balloon  that  had  escaped  from  the  United  States. 

General  Lefroy  wrote  to  Nature  about  it  (Nature,  33-99),  saying 


2$2  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

— whatever  his  sensitivenesses  may  have  been — that  the  columns  of 
the  Times  were  "hardly  suitable"  for  such  a  discussion.  If,  in  the 
past,  there  had  been  more  persons  like  General  Lefroy,  we'd  have 
better  than  the  mere  fragments  of  data  that  in  most  cases  are  too 
broken  up  very  well  to  piece  together.  He  took  the  trouble  to 
write  to  a  friend  of  his,  W.  H.  Gosling,  of  Bermuda — who  also  was 
an  extraordinary  person.  He  went  to  the  trouble  of  interviewing 
Mrs.  Bassett  and  Mrs.  Lowell.  Their  description  to  him  was  some- 
what different: 

An  object  from  which  nets  were  suspended 

Deflated  balloon,  with  its  network  hanging  from  it — =r? 

A  super-dragnet? 

That  something  was  trawling  overhead? 

The  birds  of  Baton  Rouge. 

Mr.  Gosling  wrote  that  the  item  of  chains,  or  suggestion  of  a 
basket  that  had  been  attached,  had  originated  with  Mr.  Bassett, 
who  had  not  seen  the  object.  Mr.  Gosling  mentioned  a  balloon  that 
had  escaped  from  Paris  in  July.  He  tells  of  a  balloon  that  fell  in 
Chicago,  Sept.  17,  or  three  weeks  later  than  the  Bermuda  object. 

It's  one  incredibility  against  another,  with  disregards  and  convic- 
tions governed  by  whichever  of  the  two  Dominants  looms  stronger 
in  each  reader's  mind.  That  he  can't  think  for  himself  any  more 
than  I  can  is  understood. 

My  own  correlates: 

I  think  that  we're  fished  for.  It  may  be  that  we're  highly 
esteemed  by  super-epicures  somewhere.  It  makes  me  more  cheerful 
when  I  think  that  we  may  be  of  some  use  after  all.  I  think  that 
dragnets  have  often  come  down  and  have  been  mistaken  for  whirl- 
winds and  waterspouts.  Some  accounts  of  seeming  structure  in 
whirlwinds  and  waterspouts  are  astonishing.  And  I  have  data  that, 
in  this  book,  I  can't  take  up  at  all — mysterious  disappearances.  I 
think  we're  fished  for.  But  this  is  a  little  expression  on  the  side: 
relates  to  trespassers;  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  subject  that  I 
shall  take  up  at  some  other  time — or  our  use  to  some  other  mode 
of  seeming  that  has  a  legal  right  to  us. 

Nature,  33-137: 

"Our  Paris  correspondent  writes  that  in  relation  to  the  balloon 
which  is  said  to  have  been  seen  over  Bermuda,  in  September,  no 
ascent  took  place  in  France  which  can  account  for  it." 

Last  of  August:  not  September.  In  the  London  Times  there  is  no 
mention  of  balloon  ascents  in  Great  Britain,  in  the  summer  of  1885, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  253 

but  mention  of  two  ascents  in  France.  Both  balloons  had  escaped. 
In  L' Aeronauts,  Aug.,  1885,  it  is  said  that  these  balloons  had  been 
sent  up  from  fetes  of  the  fourteenth  of  July — 44  days  before  the 
observation  at  Bermuda.  The  aeronauts  were  Gower  and  Eloy. 
Gower's  balloon  was  found  floating  on  the  ocean,  but  Eloy's  balloon 
was  not  found.  Upon  the  iyth  of  July  it  was  reported  by  a  sea 
captain:  still  in  the  air;  still  inflated. 

But  this  balloon  of  Eloy's  was  a  small  exhibition  balloon,  made 
for  short  ascents  from  fetes  and  fair  grounds.  In  La  Nature,  1885- 
2-131,  it  is  said  that  it  was  a  very  small  balloon,  incapable  of 
remaining  long  in  the  air. 

As  to  contemporaneous  ballooning  in  the  United  States,  I  find 
only  one  account:  an  ascent  in  Connecticut,  July  29,  1885.  Upon 
leaving  this  balloon,  the  aeronauts  had  pulled  the  "rip  cord,"  "turn- 
ing it  inside  out."  (N.  Y.  Times,  Aug.  10,  1885.) 

To  the  Intermediatist,  the  accusation  of  "anthropomorphism"  is 
meaningless.  There  is  nothing  in  anything  that  is  unique  or  posi- 
tively different.  We'd  be  materialists  were  it  not  quite  as  rational 
to  express  the  material  in  terms  of  the  immaterial  as  to  express  the 
immaterial  in  terms  of  the  material.  Oneness  of  allness  in  quasi- 
ness.  I  will  engage  to  write  the  formula  of  any  novel  in  psycho- 
chemic  terms,  or  draw  its  graph  in  psycho-mechanic  terms:  or  write, 
in  romantic  terms,  the  circumstances  and  sequences  of  any  chemic 
or  electric  or  magnetic  reaction:  or  express  any  historic  event  in 
algebraic  terms — or  see  Boole  and  Jevons  for  economic  situations 
expressed  algebraically. 

I  think  of  the  Dominants  as  I  think  of  persons — not  meaning  that 
they  are  real  persons — not  meaning  that  we  are  real  persons 

Or  the  Old  Dominant  and  its  jealousy,  and  its  suppression  of  all 
things  and  thoughts  that  endangered  its  supremacy.  In  reading 
discussions  of  papers,  by  scientific  societies,  I  have  often  noted  how, 
when  they  approached  forbidden — or  irreconcilable — subjects,  the 
discussions  were  thrown  into  confusion  and  ramification.  It's  as  if 
scientific  discussions  have  often  been  led  astray — as  if  purposefully 
— as  if  by  something  directive,  hovering  over  them.  Of  course  I 
mean  only  the  Spirit  of  all  Development.  Just  so,  in  any  embryo, 
cells  that  would  tend  to  vary  from  the  appearances  of  their  era  are 
compelled  to  correlate. 

In  Nature,  90-169,  Charles  Tilden  Smith  writes  that,  at  Chis- 
bury,  Wiltshire,  England,  April  8,  1912,  he  saw  something  in  the 
sky 


254  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

" — unlike  anything  that  I  had  ever  seen  before." 

"Although  I  have  studied  the  skies  for  many  years,  I  have  never 
seen  anything  like  it." 

He  saw  two  stationary  dark  patches  upon  clouds. 

The  extraordinary  part: 

They  were  stationary  upon  clouds  that  were  rapidly  moving. 

They  were  fan-shaped — or  triangular — and  varied  in  size,  but 
kept  the  same  position  upon  different  clouds  as  cloud  after  cloud 
came  along.  For  more  than  half  an  hour  Mr.  Smith  watched  these 
dark  patches 

His  impression  as  to  the  one  that  appeared  first: 

That  it  was  "really  a  heavy  shadow  cast  upon  a  thin  veil  of  clouds 
by  some  unseen  object  away  in  the  west,  which  was  intercepting  the 
sun's  rays." 

Upon  page  244,  of  this  volume  of  Nature,  is  a  letter  from  another 
correspondent,  to  the  effect  that  similar  shadows  are  cast  by  moun- 
tains upon  clouds,  and  that  no  doubt  Mr.  Smith  was  right  in  at- 
tributing the  appearance  to  "some  unseen  object,  which  was  inter- 
cepting the  sun's  rays."  But  the  Old  Dominant  that  was  a  jealous 
Dominant,  and  the  wrath  of  the  Old  Dominant  against  such  an 
irreconcilability  as  large,  opaque  objects  in  the  sky,  casting  down 
shadows  upon  clouds.  Still  the  Dominants  are  suave  very  often, 
or  are  not  absolute  gods,  and  the  way  attention  was  led  away  from 
this  subject  is  an  interesting  study  in  quasi-divine  bamboozlement. 
Upon  page  268,  Charles  J.  P.  Cave,  the  meteorologist,  writes  that, 
upon  April  5  and  8,  at  Ditcham  Park,  Petersfield,  he  had  observed 
a  similar  appearance,  while  watching  some  pilot  balloons — but  he 
describes  something  not  in  the  least  like  a  shadow  on  clouds,  but  a 
stationary  cloud — the  inference  seems  to  be  that  the  shadows  at 
Chisbury  may  have  been  shadows  of  pilot  balloons.  Upon  page  322, 
another  correspondent  writes  upon  shadows  cast  by  mountains; 
upon  page  348  some  one  else  carries  on  the  divergence  by  discussing 
this  third  letter:  then  some  one  takes  up  the  third  letter  mathemati- 
cally; and  then  there  is  a  correction  of  error  in  this  mathematic 
demonstration — I  think  it  looks  very  much  like  what  I  think  it 
looks  like. 

But  the  mystery  here: 

That  the  dark  patches  at  Chisbury  could  not  have  been  cast  by 
stationary  pilot  balloons  that  were  to  the  west,  or  that  were  between 
clouds  and  the  setting  sun.  If,  to  the  west  of  Chisbury,  a  stationary 
object  were  high  in  the  air,  intercepting  the  sun's  rays,  the  shadow 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  255 

of  the  stationary  object  would  not  have  been  stationary,  but  would 
have  moved  higher  and  higher  with  the  setting  of  the  sun. 

I  have  to  think  of  something  that  is  in  accord  with  no  other  data 
whatsoever: 

A  luminous  body — not  the  sun — in  the  sky — but,  because  of  some 
unknown  principle  or  atmospheric  condition,  its  light  extended  down 
only  about  to  the  clouds;  that  from  it  were  suspended  two  triangu- 
lar objects,  like  the  object  that  was  seen  in  Bermuda;  that  it  was 
this  light  that  fell  short  of  the  earth  that  these  objects  intercepted; 
that  the  objects  were  drawn  up  and  lowered  from  something  over- 
head, so  that,  in  its  light,  their  shadows  changed  size. 

If  my  grope  seem  to  have  no  grasp  in  it,  and,  if  a  stationary  bal- 
loon will,  in  half  an  hour,  not  cast  a  stationary  shadow  from  the 
setting  sun,  we  have  to  think  of  two  triangular  objects  that  ac- 
curately maintained  positions  in  a  line  between  sun  and  clouds,  and 
at  the  same  time  approached  and  receded  from  clouds.  Whatever 
it  may  have  been,  it's  enough  to  make  the  devout  make  the  sign  of 
the  crucible,  or  whatever  the  devotees  of  the  Old  Dominant  do  in 
the  presence  of  a  new  correlate. 

Vast,  black  thing  poised  like  a  crow  over  the  moon. 

It  is  our  acceptance  that  these  two  shadows  of  Chisbury  looked, 
from  the  moon,  like  vast  things,  black  as  crows,  poised  over  the 
earth.  It  is  our  acceptance  that  two  triangular  luminosities  and 
then  two  triangular  patches,  like  vast  black  things,  poised  like  crows 
over  the  moon,  and,  like  the  triangularites  at  Chisbury,  have  been 
seen  upon,  or  over,  the  moon: 

Scientific  American,  46-49: 

Two  triangular,  luminous  appearances  reported  by  several  ob- 
servers in  Lebanon,  Conn.,  evening  of  July  3,  1882,  on  the  moon's 
upper  limb.  They  disappeared,  and  two  dark  triangular  appear- 
ances that  looked  like  notches  were  seen  three  minutes  later  upon 
the  lower  limb.  They  approached  each  other,  met  and  instantly 
disappeared. 

The  merger  here  is  notches  that  have  at  times  been  seen  upon 
the  moon's  limb:  thought  to  be  cross  sections  of  craters  (Monthly 
Notices,  R.  A.  5.,  37-432).  But  these  appearances  of  July  3,  1882, 
were  vast  upon  the  moon — "seemed  to  be  cutting  off  or  obliterating 
nearly  a  quarter  of  its  surface." 

Something  else  that  may  have  looked  like  a  vast  black  crow  poised 
over  this  earth  from  the  moon: 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  41-599: 


256  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Description  of  a  shadow  in  the  sky,  of  some  unseen  body,  April  8, 
1913,  Fort  Worth,  Texas — supposed  to  have  been  cast  by  an  un- 
seen cloud — this  patch  or  shade  moved  with  the  declining  sun. 

Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1854-410: 

Account  by  two  observers  of  a  faint  but  distinctly  triangular  ob- 
ject, visible  for  six  nights  in  the  sky.  It  was  observed  from  two 
stations  that  were  not  far  apart.  But  the  parallax  was  considerable. 
Whatever  it  was,  it  was,  acceptably,  relatively  close  to  this  earth. 

I  should  say  that  relatively  to  phenomena  of  light  we  are  in  con- 
fusion as  great  as  some  of  the  discords  that  orthodoxy  is  in  relatively 
to  light.  Broadly  and  intermediatistically,  our  position  is: 

That  light  is  not  really  and  necessarily  light — any  more  than  is 
anything  else  really  and  necessarily  anything — but  an  interpretation 
of  a  mode  of  force,  as  I  suppose  we  have  to  call  it,  as  light.  At  sea 
level,  the  earth's  atmosphere  interprets  sunlight  as  red  or  orange  or 
yellow.  High  up  on  mountains  the  sun  is  blue.  Very  high  up  on 
mountains  the  zenith  is  black.  Or  it  is  orthodoxy  to  say  that  in 
inter-planetary  space,  where  there  is  no  air,  there  is  no  light.  So 
then  the  sun  and  comets  are  black,  but  this  earth's  atmosphere,  or, 
rather,  dust  particles  in  it,  interpret  radiations  from  these  black 
objects  as  light. 

We  look  up  at  the  moon. 

The  jet-black  moon  is  so  silvery  white. 

I  have  about  fifty  notes  indicating  that  the  moon  has  atmosphere: 
nevertheless  most  astronomers  hold  out  that  the  moon  has  no  atmos- 
phere. They  have  to:  the  theory  of  eclipses  would  not  work  out 
otherwise.  So,  arguing  in  conventional  terms,  the  moon  is  black. 
Rather  astonishing — explorers  upon  the  moon — stumbling  and 
groping  in  intense  darkness — with  telescopes  powerful  enough,  we 
could  see  them  stumbling  and  groping  in  brilliant  light. 

Or,  just  because  of  familiarity,  it  is  not  now  obvious  to  us  how 
the  preposterousnesses  of  the  old  system  must  have  seemed  to  the 
correlates  of  the  system  preceding  it. 

Ye  jet-black  silvery  moon. 

Altogether,  then,  it  may  be  conceivable  that  there  are  phenomena 
of  force  that  are  interpretable  as  light  as  far  down  as  the  clouds, 
but  not  in  denser  strata  of  air,  or  just  the  opposite  of  familiar  inter- 
pretations. 

I  now  have  some  notes  upon  an  occurrence  that  suggests  a  force 
not  interpreted  by  air  as  light,  but  interpreted,  or  reflected  by  the 
ground  as  light.  I  think  of  something  that,  for  a  week,  was  sus- 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  257 

pended  over  London:  of  an  emanation  that  was  not  interpreted  as 
light  until  it  reached  the  ground. 

Lancet,  June  i,  1867: 

That  every  night  for  a  week,  a  light  had  appeared  in  Woburn 
Square,  London,  upon  the  grass  of  a  small  park,  enclosed  by  rail- 
ings. Crowds  gathering — police  called  out  "for  the  special  service 
of  maintaining  order  and  making  the  populace  move  on."  The 
Editor  of  the  Lancet  went  to  the  Square.  He  says  that  he  saw 
nothing  but  a  patch  of  light  falling  upon  an  arbor  at  the  northeast 
corner  of  the  enclosure.  Seems  to  me  that  that  was  interesting 
enough. 

In  this  Editor  we  have  a  companion  for  Mr.  Symons  and  Dr. 
Gray.  He  suggests  that  the  light  came  from  a  street  lamp — does 
not  say  that  he  could  trace  it  to  any  such  origin  himself — but  rec- 
ommends that  the  police  investigate  neighboring  street  lamps. 

I'd  not  say  that  such  a  commonplace  as  light  from  a  street  lamp 
would  not  attract  and  excite  and  deceive  great  crowds  for  a  week — 
but  I  do  accept  that  any  cop  who  was  called  upon  for  extra  work 
would  have  needed  nobody's  suggestion  to  settle  that  point  the  very 
first  thing. 

Or  that  something  in  the  sky  hung  suspended  over  a  London 
Square  for  a  week. 


CHAPTER  XXI 

Knowledge,  Dec.  28,  1883: 

SEEING  so  many  meteorological  phenomena  in  your  excellent 
paper,  Knowledge,  I  am  tempted  to  ask  for  an  explanation  of 
the  following,  which  I  saw  when  on  board  the  British  India  Com- 
pany's steamer  Patna,  while  on  a  voyage  up  the  Persian  Gulf.  In 
May,  1880,  on  a  dark  night,  about  11:30  p.  m.,  there  suddenly 
appeared  on  each  side  of  the  ship  an  enormous  luminous  wheel, 
whirling  around,  the  spokes  of  which  seemed  to  brush  the  ship  along. 
The  spokes  would  be  200  or  300  yards  long,  and  resembled  the 
birch  rods  of  the  dames'  schools.  Each  wheel  contained  about  six- 
teen spokes,  and,  although  the  wheels  must  have  been  some  500  or 
600  yards  in  diameter,  the  spokes  could  be  distinctly  seen  all  the 
way  round.  The  phosphorescent  gleam  seemed  to  glide  along  flat 
on  the  surface  of  the  sea,  no  light  being  visible  in  the  air  above  the 
water.  The  appearance  of  the  spokes  could  be  almost  exactly  repre- 
sented by  standing  in  a  boat  and  flashing  a  bull's  eye  lantern  hori- 
zontally along  the  surface  of  the  water,  round  and  round.  I  may 
mention  that  the  phenomenon  was  also  seen  by  Captain  Avern,  of 
the  Patna,  and  Mr.  Manning,  third  officer. 

"Lee  Fore  Brace. 

"P.  S. — The  wheels  advanced  along  with  the  ship  for  about  twenty 
minutes.— L.  F.  B." 

Knowledge,  Jan.  u,  1884: 

Letter  from  "A.  Me.  D.": 

That  "Lee  Fore  Brace,"  "who  sees  'so  many  meteorological  phe- 
nomena in  your  excellent  paper/  should  have  signed  himself  'The 
Modern  Ezekiel,'  for  his  vision  of  wheels  is  quite  as  wonderful  as 
the  prophet's."  The  writer  then  takes  up  the  measurements  that 
were  given,  and  calculates  a  velocity  at  the  circumference  of  a 
wheel,  of  about  166  yards  per  second,  apparently  considering  that 
especially  incredible.  He  then  says:  "From  the  nom  de  plume  he 
assumes,  it  might  be  inferred  that  your  correspondent  is  in  the 
habit  of  'sailing  close  to  the  wind/  "  He  asks  permission  to  suggest 
an  explanation  of  his  own.  It  is  that  before  11:30  p.  m.  there  had 

258 


BOOK  OF,  THE  DAMNED  259 

been  numerous  accidents  to  the  "main  brace,"  and  that  it  had 
required  splicing  so  often  that  almost  any  ray  of  light  would  have 
taken  on  a  rotary  motion. 

In  Knowledge,  Jan.  25,  1884,  Mr.  "Brace"  answers  and  signs 
himself  "J.  W.  Robertson": 

"I  don't  suppose  A.  Me.  D.  means  any  harm,  but  I  do  think  it's 
rather  unjust  to  say  a  man  is  drunk  because  he  sees  something  out 
of  the  common.  If  there's  one  thing  I  pride  myself  upon,  it's  being 
able  to  say  that  never  in  my  life  have  I  indulged  in  anything  stronger 
than  water."  From  this  curiosity  of  pride,  he  goes  on  to  say  that 
he  had  not  intended  to  be  exact,  but  to  give  his  impressions  of 
dimensions  and  velocity.  He  ends  amiably:  "However,  'no  of- 
fense taken,  where  I  suppose  none  is  meant.' " 

To  this  letter  Mr.  Proctor  adds  a  note,  apologizing  for  the  pub- 
lication of  "A.  Me.  D's."  letter,  which  had  come  about  by  a  mis- 
understood instruction.  Then  Mr.  Proctor  wrote  disagreeable  let- 
ters, himself,  about  other  persons — what  else  would  you  expect  in  a 
quasi-existence? 

The  obvious  explanation  of  this  phenomenon  is  that,  under  the 
surface  of  the  sea,  in  the  Persian  Gulf,  was  a  vast  luminous  wheel: 
that  it  was  the  light  from  its  submerged  spokes  that  Mr.  Robertson 
saw,  shining  upward.  It  seems  clear  that  this  light  did  shine  up- 
ward from  origin  below  the  surface  of  the  sea.  But  at  first  it  is 
not  so  clear  how  vast  luminous  wheels,  each  the  size  of  a  village, 
ever  got  under  the  surface  of  the  Persian  Gulf:  also  there  may  be 
some  misunderstanding  as  to  what  they  were  doing  there. 

A  deep-sea  fish,  and  its  adaptation  to  a  dense  medium 

That,  at  least  in  some  regions  aloft,  there  is  a  medium  dense  even 
to  gelatinousness 

A  deep-sea  fish,  brought  to  the  surface  of  the  ocean:  in  a  rela- 
tively attenuated  medium,  it  disintegrates 

Super-constructions  adapted  to  a  dense  medium  in  inter-planetary 
space — sometimes,  by  stresses  of  various  kinds,  they  are  driven  into 
this  earth's  thin  atmosphere 

Later  we  shall  have  data  to  support  just  this:  that  things  enter- 
ing this  earth's  atmosphere  disintegrate  and  shine  with  a  light  that 
is  not  the  light  of  incandescence:  shine  brilliantly,  even  if  cold 

Vast  wheel-like  super-constructions — they  enter  this  earth's  at- 
mosphere, and,  threatened  with  disintegration,  plunge  for  relief  into 
an  ocean,  or  into  a  denser  medium. 

Of  course  the  requirements  now  facing  us  are: 


260  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

Not  only  data  of  vast  wheel-like  super-constructions  that  have 
relieved  their  distresses  in  the  ocean,  but  data  of  enormous  wheels 
that  have  been  seen  in  the  air,  or  entering  the  ocean,  or  rising  from 
the  ocean  and  continuing  their  voyages. 

Very  largely  we  shall  concern  ourselves  with  enormous  fiery  obi 
jects  that  have  either  plunged  into  the  ocean  or  risen  from  the  ocean. 
Our  acceptance  is  that,  though  disruption  may  intensify  into  incan- 
descence, apart  from  disruption  and  its  probable  fieriness,  things 
that  enter  this  earth's  atmosphere  have  a  cold  light  which  would 
not,  like  light  from  molten  matter,  be  instantly  quenched  by  water. 
Also  it  seems  acceptable  that  a  revolving  wheel  would,  from  a  dis- 
tance, look  like  a  globe;  that  a  revolving  wheel,  seen  relatively  close 
by,  looks  like  a  wheel  in  few  aspects.  The  mergers  of  ball-lightning 
and  meteorites  are  not  resistances  to  us:  our  data  are  of  enormous 
bodies. 

So  we  shall  interpret — and  what  does  it  matter? 

Our  attitude  throughout  this  book: 

That  here  are  extraordinary  data — that  they  never  would  be  ex- 
humed, and  never  would  be  massed  together,  unless 

Here  are  the  data: 

Our  first  datum  is  of  something  that  was  once  seen  to  enter  an 
ocean.  It's  from  the  puritanic  publication,  Science,  which  has 
yielded  us  little  material,  or  which,  like  most  puritans,  does  not  go 
upon  a  spree  very  often.  Whatever  the  thing  could  have  been,  my 
impression  is  of  tremendousness,  or  of  bulk  many  times  that  of  all 
meteorites  in  all  museums  combined:  also  of  relative  slowness,  or  of 
long  warning  of  approach.  The  story,  in  Science,  5-242,  is  from  an 
account  sent  to  the  Hydrographic  Office,  at  Washington,  from  the 
branch  office,  at  San  Francisco: 

That,  at  midnight,  Feb.  24,  1885,  Lat.  37°  N.,  and  Long.  170°  E., 
or  somewhere  between  Yokohama  and  Victoria,  the  captain  of  the 
bark  Innerwich  was  aroused  by  his  mate,  who  had  seen  something 
unusual  in  the  sky.  This  must  have  taken  appreciable  time.  The 
captain  went  on  deck  and  saw  the  sky  turning  fiery  red.  "All  at 
once,  a  large  mass  of  fire  appeared  over  the  vessel,  completely  blind- 
ing the  spectators."  The  fiery  mass  fell  into  the  sea.  Its  size  may 
be  judged  by  the  volume  of  water  cast  up  by  it,  said  to  have  rushed 
toward  the  vessel  with  a  noise  that  was  "deafening."  The  bark  was 
struck  flat  aback,  and  "a  roaring,  white  sea  passed  ahead."  "The 
master,  an  old,  experienced  mariner,  declared  that  the  awfulness  of 
the  sight  was  beyond  description." 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  261 

In  Nature,  37-187,  and  U Astronomic,  1887-76,  we  are  told  that 
an  object,  described  as  "a  large  ball  of  fire,"  was  seen  to  rise  from 
the  sea,  near  Cape  Race.  We  are  told  that  it  rose  to  a  height  of 
fifty  feet,  and  then  advanced  close  to  the  ship,  then  moving  away, 
remaining  visible  about  five  minutes.  The  supposition  in  Nature 
is  that  it  was  "ball  lightning,"  but  Flammarion,  "Thunder  and  Light- 
ning," p.  68,  says  that  it  was  enormous.  Details  in  the  American 
Meteorological  Journal,  6-443 — Nov.  12,  1887 — British  steamer 
Siberian — that  the  object  had  moved  "against  the  wind"  before 
retreating — that  Captain  Moore  said  that  at  about  the  same  place 
he  had  seen  such  appearances  before. 

Report  of  the  British  Association,  1861-30: 

That,  upon  June  18,  1845,  according  to  the  Malta  Times,  from 
the  brig  Victoria,  about  900  miles  east  of  Adalia,  Asia  Minor  (36° 
40'  56",  N.  Lat:  13°  44'  36"  E.  Long.)  three  luminous  bodies  were 
seen  to  issue  from  the  sea,  at  about  half  a  mile  from  the  vessel. 
They  were  visible  about  ten  minutes. 

The  story  was  never  investigated,  but  other  accounts  that  seem 
acceptably  to  be  other  observations  upon  this  same  sensational 
spectacle  came  in,  as  if  of  their  own  accord,  and  were  published  by 
Prof.  Baden-Powell.  One  is  a  letter  from  a  correspondent  at  Mt. 
Lebanon.  He  describes  only  two  luminous  bodies.  Apparently 
they  were  five  times  the  size  of  the  moon:  each  had  appendages,  or 
they  were  connected  by  parts  that  are  described  as  "sail-like  or 
streamer-like,"  looking  like  "large  flags  blown  out  by  a  gentle  breeze." 
The  important  point  here  is  not  only  suggestion  of  structure,  but 
duration.  The  duration  of  meteors  is  a  few  seconds:  duration  of 
fifteen  seconds  is  remarkable,  but  I  think  there  are  records  up  to 
half  a  minute.  This  object,  if  it  were  all  one  object,  was  visible 
at  Mt.  Lebanon  about  one  hour.  An  interesting  circumstance  is 
that  the  appendages  did  not  look  like  trains  of  meteors,  which  shine 
by  their  own  light,  but  "seemed  to  shine  by  light  from  the  main 
bodies." 

About  900  miles  west  of  the  position  of  the  Victoria  is  the  town 
of  Adalia,  Asia  Minor.  At  about  the  time  of  the  observation  re- 
ported by  the  captain  of  the  Victoria,  the  Rev.  F.  Hawlett,  F.  R. 
A.  S.,  was  in  Adalia.  He,  too,  saw  this  spectacle,  and  sent  an 
account  to  Prof.  Baden-Powell.  In  his  view  it  was  a  body  that 
appeared  and  then  broke  up.  He  places  duration  at  twenty  minutes 
to  half  an  hour. 

In  the  Report  of  the  British  Association,  1860-82,  the  phenom- 


262  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

enon  was  reported  from  Syria  and  Malta,  as  two  very  large  bodies 
"nearly  joined." 

Kept.  Brit.  Assoc.,  1860-77: 

That,  at  Cherbourg,  France,  Jan.  12,  1836,  was  seen  a  luminous 
body,  seemingly  two-thirds  the  size  of  the  moon.  It  seemed  to 
rotate  on  an  axis.  Central  to  it  there  seemed  to  be  a  dark  cavity. 

For  other  accounts,  all  indefinite,  but  distortable  into  data  of 
wheel-like  objects  in  the  sky,  see  Nature,  22-617;  London  Times, 
Oct.  15,  1859;  Nature,  21-225;  Monthly  Weather  Review,  1883-264. 

L'Astronomie,  1 894-1 57 : 

That,  upon  the  morning  of  Dec.  20,  1893,  an  appearance  in  the 
sky  was  seen  by  many  persons  in  Virginia,  North  Carolina,  and 
South  Carolina.  A  luminous  body  passed  overhead,  from  west  to 
east,  until  at  about  15  degrees  in  the  eastern  horizon,  it  appeared 
to  stand  still  for  fifteen  or  twenty  minutes.  According  to  some 
descriptions  it  was  the  size  of  a  table.  To  some  observers  it  looked 
like  an  enormous  wheel.  The  light  was  a  brilliant  white.  Accept- 
ably it  was  not  an  optical  illusion — the  noise  of  its  passage  through 
the  air  was  heard.  Having  been  stationary,  or  having  seemed  to 
stand  still  fifteen  or  twenty  minutes,  it  disappeared,  or  exploded. 
No  sound  of  explosion  was  heard. 

Vast  wheel-like  constructions.  They're  especially  adapted  to  roll 
through  a  gelatinous  medium  from  planet  to  planet.  Sometimes, 
because  of  miscalculations,  or  because  of  stresses  of  various  kinds, 
they  enter  this  earth's  atmosphere.  They're  likely  to  explode.  They 
have  to  submerge  in  the  sea.  They  stay  in  the  sea  a  while,  revolv- 
ing with  relative  leisureliness,  until  relieved,  and  then  emerge,  some- 
times close  to  vessels.  Seamen  tell  of  what  they  see:  their  reports 
are  interred  in  scientific  morgues.  I  should  say  that  the  general 
route  of  these  constructions  is  along  latitudes  not  far  from  the  lati- 
tudes of  the  Persian  Gulf. 

Journal  of  the  Royal  Meteorological  Society,  28-29: 

That,  upon  April  4,  1901,  about  8:30,  in  the  Persian  Gulf, 
Captain  Hoseason,  of  the  steamship  KUwa,  according  to  a  paper 
read  before  the  Society  by  Captain  Hoseason,  was  sailing  in  a  sea 
in  which  there  was  no  phosphorescence — "there  being  no  phosphores- 
cence in  the  water." 

I  suppose  I'll  have  to  repeat  that: 

"...  there  being  no  phosphorescence  in  the  water." 

Vast  shafts  of  light — though  the  Captain  uses  the  word  "ripples" 
— suddenly  appeared.  Shaft  followed  shaft,  upon  the  surface  of 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  263 

the  sea.  But  it  was  only  a  faint  light,  and,  in  about  fifteen  min- 
utes, died  out:  having  appeared  suddenly;  having  died  out  grad- 
ually. The  shafts  revolved  at  a  velocity  of  about  60  miles  an  hour. 

Phosphorescent  jelly  fish  correlate  with  the  Old  Dominant:  in 
one  of  the  most  heroic  compositions  of  disregards  in  our  experience, 
it  was  agreed,  in  the  discussion  of  Capt.  Hoseason's  paper,  that  the 
phenomenon  was  probably  pulsations  of  long  strings  of  jelly  fish. 

Nature,  21-410: 

Reprint  of  a  letter  from  R.  E.  Harris,  Commander  of  the  A.  H. 
N.  Co.'s  steamship  Shahjehan,  to  the  Calcutta  Englishman,  Jan.  21, 
1880: 

That  upon  the  $th  of  June,  1880,  off  the  coast  of  Malabar,  at 
10  p.  m.,  water  calm,  sky  cloudless,  he  had  seen  something  that 
was  so  foreign  to  anything  that  he  had  ever  seen  before,  that  he  had 
stopped  his  ship.  He  saw  what  he  describes  as  waves  of  brilliant 
light,  with  spaces  between.  Upon  the  water  were  floating  patches 
of  a  substance  that  was  not  identified.  Thinking  in  terms  of  the 
conventional  explanation  of  all  phosphorescence  at  sea,  the  Captain 
at  first  suspected  this  substance.  However,  he  gives  his  opinion 
that  it  did  no  illuminating  but  was,  with  the  rest  of  the  sea,  illu- 
minated by  tremendous  shafts  of  light.  Whether  it  was  a  thick  and 
oily  discharge  from  the  engine  of  a  submerged  construction  or  not, 
I  think  that  I  shall  have  to  accept  this  substance  as  a  concomitant, 
because  of  another  note.  "As  wave  succeeded  wave,  one  of  the 
most  grand  and  brilliant,  yet  solemn,  spectacles  that  one  could 
think  of,  was  here  witnessed." 

Jour.  Roy.  Met.  Soc.,  32-280: 

Extract  from  a  letter  from  Mr.  Douglas  Carnegie,  Blackheath, 
England.  Date  some  time  in  1906 

"This  last  voyage  we  witnessed  a  weird  and  most  extraordinary 
electric  display."  In  the  Gulf  of  Oman,  he  saw  a  bank  of  ap- 
parently quiescent  phosphorescence:  but,  when  within  twenty  yards 
of  it,  "shafts  of  brilliant  light  came  sweeping  across  the  ship's  bows 
at  a  prodigious  speed,  which  might  be  put  down  as  anything  between 
60  and  200  miles  an  hour."  "These  light  bars  were  about  20  feet 
apart  and  most  regular."  As  to  phosphorescence — "I  collected  a 
bucketful  of  water,  and  examined  it  under  the  microscope,  but  could 
not  detect  anything  abnormal."  That  the  shafts  of  light  came  up 
from  something  beneath  the  surface — "They  first  struck  us  on  our 
broadside,  and  I  noticed  that  an  intervening  ship  had  no  effect  on 


264  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

the  light  beams:  they  started  away  from  the  lee  side  of  the  ship, 
just  as  if  they  had  traveled  right  through  it." 

The  Gulf  of  Oman  is  at  the  entrance  to  the  Persian  Gulf. 

Jour.  Roy.  Met.  Soc.,  33-294: 

Extract  from  a  letter  by  Mr.  S.  C.  Patterson,  second  officer  of  the 
P.  and  O.  steamship  Delta:  a  spectacle  which  the  Journal  continues 
to  call  phosphorescent: 

Malacca  Strait,  2  a.  m.,  March  14,  1907: 

"...  shafts  which  seemed  to  move  round  a  center — like  the 
spokes  of  a  wheel — and  appeared  to  be  about  300  yards  long."  The 
phenomenon  lasted  about  half  an  hour,  during  which  time  the  ship 
had  traveled  six  or  seven  miles.  It  stopped  suddenly," 

L'Astronomie,  1891-312: 

A  correspondent  writes  that,  in  October,  1891,  in  the  China  Sea, 
he  had  seen  shafts  or  lances  of  light  that  had  had  the  appearance 
of  rays  of  a  searchlight,  and  that  had  moved  like  such  rays. 

Nature,  20-291: 

Report  to  the  Admiralty  by  Capt.  Evans,  the  Hydrographer  of 
the  British  Navy: 

That  Commander  J.  E.  Pringle,  of  H.  M.  S.  Vulture,  had  reported 
that,  at  Lat.  26°  26'  N.,  and  Long.  53°  n'  E.— in  the  Persian 
Gulf — May  15,  1879,  he  had  noticed  luminous  waves  or  pulsations 
in  the  water,  moving  at  great  speed.  This  time  we  have  a  definite 
datum  upon  origin  somewhere  below  the  surface.  It  is  said  that 
these  waves  of  light  passed  under  the  Vulture.  "On  looking  toward 
the  east,  the  appearance  was  that  of  a  revolving  wheel  with  a 
center  on  that  bearing,  and  whose  spokes  were  illuminated,  and, 
looking  toward  the  west,  a  similar  wheel  appeared  to  be  revolving, 
but  in  the  opposite  direction.  Or  finally  as  to  submergence — 
"These  waves  of  light  extended  from  the  surface  well  under  the 
water."  It  is  Commander  Pringle's  opinion  that  the  shafts  con- 
stituted one  wheel,  and  that  doubling  was  an  illusion.  He  judges 
the  shafts  to  have  been  about  25  feet  broad,  and  the  spaces  about 
100.  Velocity  about  84  miles  an  hour.  Duration  about  35  minutes. 
Time  9:40  p.  m.  Before  and  after  this  display  the  ship  had  passed 
through  patches  of  floating  substance  described  as  "oily-looking  fish 
spawn." 

Upon  page  428  of  this  number  of  Nature,  E.  L.  Moss  says  that, 
in  April,  1875,  when  upon  H.  M.  S.  Bulldog,  a  few  miles  north  of 
Vera  Cruz,  he  had  seen  a  series  of  swift  lines  of  light.  He  had 
dipped  up  some  of  the  water,  finding  in  it  animalcule,  which  would, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  265 

however,  not  account  for  phenomena  of  geometric  formation  and 
high  velocity.  If  he  means  Vera  Cruz,  Mexico,  this  is  the  only 
instance  we  have  out  of  oriental  waters. 

Scientific  American,  106-51: 

That,  in  the  Nautical  Meteorological  Annual,  published  by  the 
Danish  Meteorological  Institute,  appears  a  report  upon  a  "singular 
phenomenon"  that  was  seen  by  Capt.  Gabe,  of  the  Danish  East 
Asiatic  Co.'s  steamship  Bintang.  At  3  a.  m.,  June  10,  1909,  while 
sailing  through  the  Straits  of  Malacca,  Captain  Gabe  saw  a  vast 
revolving  wheel  of  light,  flat  upon  the  water — "long  arms  issuing 
from  a  center  around  which  the  whole  system  appeared  to  rotate." 
So  vast  was  the  appearance  that  only  half  of  it  could  be  seen  at  a 
time,  the  center  lying  near  the  horizon.  This  display  lasted  about 
fifteen  minutes.  Heretofore  we  have  not  been  clear  upon  the  im- 
portant point  that  forward  motions  of  these  wheels  do  not  synchro- 
nize with  a  vessel's  motions,  and  freaks  of  disregard,  or,  rather, 
commonplaces  of  disregard,  might  attempt  to  assimilate  with  lights 
of  a  vessel.  This  time  we  are  told  that  the  vast  wheel  moved  for- 
ward, decreasing  in  brilliancy,  and  also  in  speed  of  rotation,  dis- 
appearing when  the  center  was  right  ahead  of  the  vessel — or  my 
own  interpretation  would  be  that  the  source  of  light  was  submerg- 
ing deeper  and  deeper  and  slowing  down  because  meeting  more  and 
more  resistance. 

The  Danish  Meteorological  Institute  reports  another  instance: 

That,  when  Capt.  Breyer,  of  the  Dutch  steamer  Valentijn,  was  in 
the  South  China  Sea,  midnight,  Aug.  12,  1910,  he  saw  a  rotation  of 
flashes.  "It  looked  like  a  horizontal  wheel,  turning  rapidly."  This 
time  it  is  said  that  the  appearance  was  above  water.  "The  phe- 
nomenon was  observed  by  the  captain,  the  first  and  second  mates, 
and  the  first  engineer,  and  upon  all  of  them  it  made  a  somewhat 
uncomfortable  impression." 

In  general,  if  our  expression  be  not  immediately  acceptable,  we 
recommend  to  rival  interpreters  that  they  consider  the  localization 
• — with  one  exception — of  this  phenomenon,  to  the  Indian  Ocean 
and  adjacent  waters,  or  Persian  Gulf  on  one  side  and  China  Sea  on 
the  other  side.  Though  we're  Intermediatists,  the  call  of  attempted 
Positivism,  in  the  aspect  of  Completeness,  is  irresistible.  We  have 
expressed  that  from  few  aspects  would  wheels  of  fire  in  the  air  look 
like  wheels  of  fire,  but,  if  we  can  get  it,  we  must  have  observation 
upon  vast  luminous  wheels,  not  interpretable  as  optical  illusions, 


266  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

but  enormous,  substantial  things  that  have  smashed  down  material 
resistances,  and  have  been  seen  to  plunge  into  the  ocean: 

Athenceum,  1848-833: 

That  at  the  meeting  of  the  British  Association,  1848,  Sir  W.  S. 
Harris  said  that  he  had  recorded  an  account  sent  to  him  of  a  vessel 
toward  which  had  whirled  "two  wheels  of  fire,  which  the  men 
described  as  rolling  millstones  of  fire."  "When  they  came  near,  an 
awful  crash  took  place:  the  topmasts  were  shivered  to  pieces."  It 
is  said  that  there  was  a  strong  sulphurous  odor. 


CHAPTER  XXII 

Journal  of  the  Royal  Meteorological  Society,  1-157: 

EXTRACT  from  the  log  of  the  barque  Lady  of  the  Lake,  by 
Capt.  F.  W.  Banner: 

Communicated  by  R.  H.  Scott,  F.  R.  S.: 

That,  upon  the  22nd  of  March,  1870,  at  Lat.  5°  47'  N.,  Long.  27° 
52'  W.,  the  sailors  of  the  Lady  of  the  Lake  saw  a  remarkable  object, 
or  "cloud,"  in  the  sky.  They  reported  to  the  Captain. 

According  to  Capt.  Banner,  it  was  a  cloud  of  circular  form,  with 
an  included  semicircle  divided  into  four  parts,  the  central  dividing 
shaft  beginning  at  the  center  of  the  circle  and  extending  far  out- 
ward, and  then  curving  backward. 

Geometricity  and  complexity  and  stability  of  form:  and  the  small 
likelihood  of  a  cloud  maintaining  such  diversity  of  features,  to  say 
nothing  of  appearance  of  organic  form. 

The  thing  traveled  from  a  point  at  about  20  degrees  above  the 
horizon  to  a  point  about  80  degrees  above.  Then  it  settled  down 
to  the  northeast,  having  appeared  from  the  south,  southeast. 

Light  gray  in  color,  or  it  was  cloud-color. 

"It  was  much  lower  than  the  other  clouds." 

And  this  datum  stands  out: 

That,  whatever  it  may  have  been,  it  traveled  against  the  wind. 

"It  came  up  obliquely  against  the  wind,  and  finally  settled  down 
right  in  the  wind's  eye." 

For  half  an  hour  this  form  was  visible.  When  it  did  finally  dis- 
appear that  was  not  because  it  disintegrated  like  a  cloud,  but  be- 
cause it  was  lost  to  sight  in  the  evening  darkness. 

Capt.  Banner  draws  the  following  diagram: 


267 


CHAPTER  XXIII 

>TpEXT-BOOKS  tell  us  that  the  Dhurmsalla  meteorites  were 
JL  picked  up  "soon,"  or  "within  half  an  hour."  Given  a  little 
time  the  conventionalists  may  argue  that  these  stones  were  hot  when 
they  fell,  but  that  their  great  interior  coldness  had  overcome  the 
molten  state  of  their  surfaces. 

According  to  the  Deputy  Commissioner  of  Dhurmsalla,  these 
stones  had  been  picked  up  "immediately"  by  passing  coolies. 

These  stones  were  so  cold  that  they  benumbed  the  fingers.  But 
they  had  fallen  with  a  great  light.  It  is  described  as  "a  flame  of 
fire  about  two  feet  in  depth  and  nine  feet  in  length."  Acceptably 
this  light  was  not  the  light  of  molten  matter. 

In  this  chapter  we  are  very  intermediatistic — and  unsatisfactory. 
To  the  intermediatist  there  is  but  one  answer  to  all  questions: 

Sometimes  and  sometimes  not. 

Another  form  of  this  intermediatist  "solution"  of  all  problems  is: 

Yes  and  no. 

Everything  that  is,  also  isn't. 

A  positivist  attempts  to  formulate:  so  does  the  intermediatist, 
but  with  less  rigorousness:  he  accepts  but  also  denies:  he  may  seem 
to  accept  in  one  respect  and  deny  in  some  other  respect,  but  no  real 
line  can  be  drawn  between  any  two  aspects  of  anything.  The  inter- 
mediatist accepts  that  which  seems  to  correlate  with  something  that 
he  has  accepted  as  a  dominant.  The  positivist  correlates  with  a 
belief. 

In  the  Dhurmsalla  meteorites  we  have  support  for  our  expression 
that  things  entering  this  earth's  atmosphere  sometimes  shine  with  a 
light  that  is  not  the  light  of  incandescence — or  so  we  account,  or 
offer  an  expression  upon,  "thunderstones,"  or  carved  stones  that 
have  fallen  luminously  to  this  earth,  in  streaks  that  have  looked 
like  strokes  of  lightning — but  we  accept,  also,  that  some  things  that 
have  entered  this  earth's  atmosphere,  disintegrate  with  the  inten- 
sity of  flame  and  molten  matter — but  some  things,  we  accept,  enter 
this  earth's  atmosphere  and  collapse  non-luminously,  quite  like 
deep-sea  fishes  brought  to  the  surface  of  the  ocean.  Whatever 

268 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  269 

agreement  we  have  is  an  indication  that  somewhere  aloft  there  is  a 
medium  denser  than  this  earth's  atmosphere.  I  suppose  our  strong- 
hold is  in  that  such  is  not  popular  belief— 

Or  the  rhythm  of  all  phenomena: 

Air  dense  at  sea  level  upon  this  earth — less  and  less  dense  as  one 
ascends — then  denser  and  denser.  A  good  many  bothersome  ques- 
tions arise 

Our  attitude: 

Here  are  the  data: 

Luminous  rains  sometimes  fall  (Nature,  March  9,  1882;  Nature, 
25-437)-  Tm*s  is  light  that  is  not  the  light  of  incandescence,  but 
no  one  can  say  that  these  occasional,  or  rare,  rains  come  from  this 
earth's  externality.  We  simply  note  cold  light  of  falling  bodies. 
For  luminous  rain,  snow,  and  dust,  see  Hartwig,  "Aerial  World,"  p. 
319.  As  to  luminous  clouds,  we  have  more  nearly  definite  observa- 
tions and  opinions:  they  mark  transition  between  the  Old  Dom- 
inant and  the  New  Dominant.  We  have  already  noted  the  transi- 
tion in  Prof.  Schwedoff's  theory  of  external  origin  of  some  hail- 
stones— and  the  implications  that,  to  a  former  generation,  seemed 
so  preposterous — "droll"  was  the  word — that  there  are  in  inter- 
planetary regions  volumes  of  water — whether  they  have  fishes  and 
frogs  in  them  or  not.  Now  our  acceptance  is  that  clouds  some- 
times come  from  external  regions,  having  had  origin  from  super- 
geographical  lakes  and  oceans  that  we  shall  not  attempt  to  chart, 
just  at  present — only  suggesting  to  enterprising  aviators — and  we 
note  that  we  put  it  all  up  to  them,  and  show  no  inclination  to  go 
Columbussing  on  our  own  account — that  they  take  bathing  suits, 
or,  rather,  deep-sea-diving-suits  along.  So  then  that  some  clouds 
come  from  inter-planetary  oceans — of  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea — if  we 
still  accept  the  Super-Sargasso  Sea — and  shine,  upon  entering  this 
earth's  atmosphere.  In  Himmel  und  Erde,  Feb.,  1889 — a  phenom- 
enon of  transition  of  thirty  years  ago — Herr  O.  Jesse,  in  his  observa- 
tions upon  luminous  night-clouds,  notes  the  great  height  of  them, 
and  drolly  or  sensibly  suggests  that  some  of  them  may  have  come 
from  regions  external  to  this  earth.  I  suppose  he  means  only  from 
other  planets.  But  it's  a  very  droll  and  sensible  idea  either  way. 

In  general  I  am  accounting  for  a  great  deal  of  this  earth's  isola- 
tion: that  it  is  relatively  isolated  by  circumstances  that  are  similar 
to  the  circumstances  that  make  for  relative  isolation  of  the  bottom 
of  the  ocean — except  that  there  is  a  clumsiness  of  analogy  now.  To 
call  ourselves  deep-sea  fishes  has  been  convenient,  but,  in  a  quasi- 


270  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

existence,  there  is  no  convenience  that  will  not  sooner  or  later  turn 
awkward — so,  if  there  be  denser  regions  aloft,  these  regions  should 
now  be  regarded  as  analogues  of  far-submerged  oceanic  regions,  and 
things  coming  to  this  earth  would  be  like  things  rising  to  an  attenu- 
ated medium — and  exploding — sometimes  incandescently,  some- 
times with  cold  light — sometimes  non-luminously,  like  deep-sea 
fishes  brought  to  the  surface — altogether  conditions  of  inhospitality. 
I  have  a  suspicion  that,  in  their  own  depths,  deep-sea  fishes  are  not 
luminous.  If  they  are,  Darwinism  is  mere  Jesuitism,  in  attempting 
to  correlate  them.  Such  advertising  would  so  attract  attention  that 
all  advantages  would  be  more  than  offset.  Darwinism  is  largely  a 
doctrine  of  concealment:  here  we  have  brazen  proclamation — if  ac- 
cepted. Fishes  in  the  Mammoth  Cave  need  no  light  to  see  by.  We 
might  have  an  expression  that  deep-sea  fishes  turn  luminous  upon 
entering  a  less  dense  medium — but  models  in  the  American  Museum 
of  Natural  History:  specialized  organs  of  luminosity  upon  these 
models.  Of  course  we  do  remember  that  awfully  convincing  "dodo," 
and  some  of  our  sophistications  we  trace  to  him — at  any  rate  dis- 
ruption is  regarded  as  a  phenomenon  of  coming  from  a  dense  to  a 
less  dense  medium. 

An  account  by  M.  Acharius,  in  the  Transactions  of  the  Swedish 
Academy  of  Sciences,  1808-215,  translated  for  the  North  American 
Review,  3-319' 

That  M.  Acharius,  having  heard  of  "an  extraordinary  and  prob- 
ably hitherto  unseen  phenomenon,"  reported  from  near  the  town  of 
Skeninge,  Sweden,  investigated: 

That,  upon  the  i6th  of  May,  1808,  at  about  4  p.  m.,  the  sun 
suddenly  turned  dull  brick-red.  At  the  same  time  there  appeared, 
upon  the  western  horizon,  a  great  number  of  round  bodies,  dark 
brown,  and  seemingly  the  size  of  a  hat  crown.  They  passed  over- 
head and  disappeared  in  the  eastern  horizon.  Tremendous  proces- 
sion. It  lasted  two  hours.  Occasionally  one  fell  to  the  ground. 
When  the  place  of  a  fall  was  examined,  there  was  found  a  film, 
which  soon  dried  and  vanished.  Often,  when  approaching  the  sun, 
these  bodies  seemed  to  link  together,  or  were  then  seen  to  be  linked 
together,  in  groups  not  exceeding  eight,  and,  under  the  sun,  they 
were  seen  to  have  tails  three  or  four  fathoms  long.  Away  from  the 
sun  the  tails  were  invisible.  Whatever  their  substance  may  have 
been,  it  is  described  as  gelatinous — "soapy  and  jellied." 

I  place  this  datum  here  for  several  reasons.  It  would  have  been  a 
good  climax  to  our  expression  upon  hordes  of  small  bodies  that,  in 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  271 

our  acceptance,  were  not  seeds,  nor  birds,  nor  ice-crystals:  but  the 
tendency  would  have  been  to  jump  to  the  homogeneous  conclusion 
that  all  our  data  in  that  expression  related  to  this  one  kind  of 
phenomena,  whereas  we  conceive  of  infinite  heterogeneity  of  the 
external:  of  crusaders  and  rabbles  and  emigrants  and  tourists  and 
dragons  and  things  like  gelatinous  hat  crowns.  Or  that  all  things, 
here,  upon  this  earth,  that  flock  together,  are  not  necessarily  sheep, 
Presbyterians,  gangsters,  or  porpoises.  The  datum  is  important  to 
us,  here,  as  indication  of  disruption  in  this  earth's  atmosphere — 
dangers  in  entering  this  earth's  atmosphere. 

I  think,  myself,  that  thousands  of  objects  have  been  seen  to  fall 
from  aloft,  and  have  exploded  luminously,  and  have  been  called 
"ball  lightning." 

"As  to  what  ball  lightning  is,  we  have  not  yet  begun  to  make 
intelligent  guesses."  (Monthly  Weather  Review,  34-17.) 

In  general,  it  seems  to  me  that  when  we  encounter  the  opposition 
"ball  lightning"  we  should  pay  little  attention,  but  confine  our- 
selves to  guesses  that  are  at  least  intelligent,  that  stand  phantom- 
like  in  our  way.  We  note  here  that  in  some  of  our  acceptances 
upon  intelligence  we  should  more  clearly  have  pointed  out  that  they 
were  upon  the  intelligent  as  opposed  to  the  instinctive.  In  the 
Monthly  Weather  Review,  33-409,  there  is  an  account  of  "ball  light- 
ning" that  struck  a  tree.  It  made  a  dent  such  as  a  falling  object 
would  make.  Some  other  time  I  shall  collect  instances  of  "ball 
lightning,"  to  express  that  they  are  instances  of  objects  that  have 
fallen  from  the  sky,  luminously,  exploding  terrifically.  So  bewil- 
dered is  the  old  orthodoxy  by  these  phenomena  that  many  scientists 
have  either  denied  "ball  lightning"  or  have  considered  it  very  doubt- 
ful. I  refer  to  Dr.  Sestier's  list  of  one  hundred  and  fifty  instances, 
which  he  considered  authentic. 

In  accord  with  our  disaccord  is  an  instance  related  in  the  Monthly 
Weather  Review,  March,  1887— something  that  fell  luminously  from 
the  sky,  accompanied  by  something  that  was  not  so  affected,  or  that 
was  dark: 

That,  according  to  Capt.  C.  D.  Sweet,  of  the  Dutch  bark,  /.  P.  A., 
upon  March  19,  1887,  N.  37°  39',  W.  57°  oo',  he  encountered  a 
severe  storm.  He  saw  two  objects  in  the  air  above  the  ship.  One 
was  luminous,  and  might  be  explained  in  several  ways,  but  the 
other  was  dark.  One  or  both  fell  into  the  sea,  with  a  roar  and  the 
casting  up  of  billows.  It  is  our  acceptance  that  these  things  had 


272  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

entered  this  earth's  atmosphere,  having  first  crashed  through  a  field 
of  ice — "immediately  afterward  lumps  of  ice  fell." 

One  of  the  most  astonishing  of  the  phenomena  of  "ball  lightning" 
is  a  phenomenon  of  many  meteorites:  violence  of  explosion  out  of 
all  proportion  to  size  and  velocity.  We  accept  that  the  icy  meteor- 
ites of  Dhurmsalla  could  have  fallen  with  no  great  velocity,  but  the 
sound  from  them  was  tremendous.  The  soft  substance  that  fell  at 
the  Cape  of  Good  Hope  was  carbonaceous,  but  was  unburned,  or 
had  fallen  with  velocity  insufficient  to  ignite  it.  The  tremendous 
report  that  it  made  was  heard  over  an  area  more  than  seventy  miles 
in  diameter. 

That  some  hailstones  have  been  formed  in  a  dense  medium,  and 
violently  disintegrate  in  this  earth's  relatively  thin  atmosphere: 

Nature,  88-350: 

Large  hailstones  noted  at  the  University  of  Missouri,  Nov.  n, 
1911:  they  exploded  with  sounds  like  pistol  shots.  The  writer  says 
that  he  had  noticed  a  similar  phenomenon,  eighteen  years  before,  at 
Lexington,  Kentucky.  Hailstones  that  seemed  to  have  been  formed 
in  a  denser  medium:  when  melted  under  water  they  gave  out  bubbles 
larger  than  their  central  air  spaces.  (Monthly  Weather  Review, 

33-445-) 

Our  acceptance  is  that  many  objects  have  fallen  from  the  sky, 
but  that  many  of  them  have  disintegrated  violently.  This  accept- 
ance will  coordinate  with  data  still  to  come,  but,  also,  we  make  it 
easy  for  ourselves  in  our  expressions  upon  super-constructions,  if 
we're  asked  why,  from  thinkable  wrecks  of  them,  girders,  plates,  or 
parts  recognizably  of  manufactured  metal  have  not  fallen  from  the 
sky.  However,  as  to  composition,  we  have  not  this  refuge,  so  it  is 
our  expression  that  there  have  been  reported  instances  of  the  fall 
of  manufactured  metal  from  the  sky. 

The  meteorite  of  Rutherford,  North  Carolina,  is  of  artificial  ma- 
terial: mass  of  pig  iron.  It  is  said  to  be  fraudulent.  (Amer.  Jour. 
Sci.,  2-34-298.) 

The  object  that  was  said  to  have  fallen  at  Marblehead,  Mass.,  in 
1858,  is  described  in  the  Amer.  Jour.  Sci.,  2-34-135,  as  "a  furnace 
product,  formed  in  smelting  copper  ores,  or  iron  ores  containing 
copper."  It  is  said  to  be  fraudulent. 

According  to  Ehrenberg,  the  substance  reported  by  Capt.  Callam 
to  have  fallen  upon  his  vessel,  near  Java,  "offered  complete  resem- 
blance to  the  residue  resulting  from  combustion  of  a  steel  wire  in  a 
flask  of  oxygen."  (Zurcher,  "Meteors"  p.  239.)  Nature,  Nov.  21, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  273 

1878,  publishes  a  notice  that,  according  to  the  Yuma  Sentinel,  a 
meteorite  that  "resembles  steel"  had  been  found  in  the  Mohave 
Desert.  In  Nature,  Feb.  15,  1894,  we  read  that  one  of  the  meteor- 
ites brought  to  the  United  States  by  Peary,  from  Greenland,  is  of 
tempered  steel.  The  opinion  is  that  meteoric  iron  had  fallen  in 
water  or  snow,  quickly  cooling  and  hardening.  This  does  not  apply 
to  composition.  Nov.  5,  1898,  Nature  publishes  a  notice  of  a  paper 
by  Prof.  Berwerth,  of  Vienna,  upon  "the  close  connection  between 
meteoric  iron  and  steel-works'  steel. 

At  the  meeting  of  Nov.  24,  1906,  of  the  Essex  Field  Club,  was 
exhibited  a  piece  of  metal  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  Oct.  9, 
1906,  at  Braintree.  According  to  the  Essex  Naturalist,  Dr.  Fletcher, 
of  the  British  Museum,  had  declared  this  metal  to  be  smelted  iron — 
"so  that  the  mystery  of  its  reported  'fall'  remained  unexplained." 


CHAPTER  XXIV 

WE  shall  have  an  outcry  of  silences.  If  a  single  instance  of 
anything  be  disregarded  by  a  System — our  own  attitude  is 
that  a  single  instance  is  a  powerless  thing.  Of  course  our  own 
method  of  agreement  of  many  instances  is  not  a  real  method.  In 
Continuity,  all  things  must  have  resemblances  with  all  other  things. 
Anything  has  any  quasi-identity  you  please.  Some  time  ago  con- 
scription was  assimilated  with  either  autocracy  or  democracy  with 
equal  facility.  Note  the  need  for  a  dominant  to  correlate  to. 
Scarcely  anybody  said  simply  that  we  must  have  conscription:  but 
that  we  must  have  conscription,  which  correlates  with  democracy/, 
which  was  taken  as  a  base,  or  something  basically  desirable.  Of 
course  between  autocracy  and  democracy  nothing  but  false  demarca- 
tion can  be  drawn.  So  I  can  conceive  of  no  subject  upon  which 
there  should  be  such  poverty  as  a  single  instance,  if  anything  one 
pleases  can  be  whipped  into  line.  However,  we  shall  try  to  be  more 
nearly  real  than  the  Darwinites  who  advance  concealing  coloration 
as  Darwinism,  and  then  drag  in  proclaiming  luminosity,  too,  as  Dar- 
winism. I  think  the  Darwinites  had  better  come  in  with  us  as  to 
the  deep-sea  fishes — and  be  sorry  later,  I  suppose.  It  will  be  amaz- 
ing or  negligible  to  read  all  the  instances  now  to  come  of  things 
that  have  been  seen  in  the  sky,  and  to  think  that  all  have  been 
disregarded.  My  own  opinion  is  that  it  is  not  possible,  or  very 
easy,  to  disregard  them,  now  that  they  have  been  brought  together 
— but  that,  if  prior  to  about  this  time  we  had  attempted  such  an 
assemblage,  the  Old  Dominant  would  have  withered  our  typewriter 
— as  it  is  the  letter  "e"  has  gone  back  on  us,  and  the  "s"  is  tempera- 
mental. 

"Most  extraordinary  and  singular  phenomenon,"  North  Wales, 
Aug.  26,  1894;  a  disk  from  which  projected  an  orange-colored  body 
that  looked  like  "an  elongated  flatfish,"  reported  by  Admiral  Om- 
manney  (Nature,  50-524) ;  disk  from  which  projected  a  hook-like 
form,  India,  about  1838;  diagram  of  it  given;  disk  about  size  of 
the  moon,  but  brighter  than  the  moon;  visible  about  twenty  min- 
utes; by  G.  Pettit,  in  Prof.  Baden-Powell's  Catalogue  (Kept.  Brit. 

274 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  275 

Assoe.,  1849);  verv  brilliant  hook-like  form,  seen  in  the  sky  at 
Poland,  Trumbull  Co.,  Ohio,  during  the  stream  of  meteors,  of  1833; 
visible  more  than  an  hour:  large  luminous  body,  almost  stationary 
"for  a  time";  shaped  like  a  square  table;  Niagara  Falls,  Nov.  13, 
1833  (Amer.  Jour.  Set.,  1-25-391);  something  described  as  a  bright 
white  cloud,  at  night,  Nov.  3,  1886,  at  Hamar,  Norway;  from  it 
were  emitted  brilliant  rays  of  light;  drifted  across  the  sky;  "re- 
tained throughout  its  original  form"  (Nature,  Dec.  16,  1886-158); 
thing  with  an  oval  nucleus,  and  streamers  with  dark  bands  and  lines 
very  suggestive  of  structure;  New  Zealand,  May  4,  1888  (Nature, 
42-402);  luminous  object,  size  of  full  moon,  visible  an  hour  and 
a  half,  Chili,  Nov.  5,  1883  (Comptes  Rendus,  103-682);  bright  ob- 
ject near  sun,  Dec.  21,  1882  (Knowledge,  3-13);  light  that  looked 
like  a  great  flame,  far  out  at  sea,  off  Ryook  Phyoo,  Dec.  2,  1845 
(London  Roy.  Soc.  Proc.,  5-627);  something  like  a  gigantic  trum- 
pet, suspended,  vertical,  oscillating  gently,  visible  five  or  six  min- 
utes, length  estimated  at  425  feet,  at  Oaxaca,  Mexico,  July  6,  1874 
(Sci.  Am.  Sup.,  6-2365);  two  luminous  bodies,  seemingly  united, 
visible  five  or  six  minutes,  June  3,  1898  (La  Nature,  1898-1-127); 
thing  with  a  tail,  crossing  moon,  transit  half  a  minute,  Sept.  26, 

1870  (London  Times,  Sept.  30,  1870);  object  four  or  five  times 
size  of  moon,  moving  slowly  across  sky,  Nov.  i,  1885,  near  Adri- 
anople  (L 'Astronomic,  1886-309) ;  large  body,  colored  red,  moving 
slowly,  visible  15  minutes,  reported  by  Coggia,  Marseilles,  Aug.  i, 

1871  (Chem.  News,  24-193);  details  of  this  observation,  and  simi- 
lar observation  by  Guillemin,  and  other  instances  by  de  Fonville 
(Comptes  Rendus,  73-297,  755);   thing  that  was  large  and  that 
was  stationary  twice  in  seven  minutes,  Oxford,  Nov.  19,  1847;  listed 
by  Lowe  (Rec.  Sci.,  1-136) ;  grayish  object  that  looked  to  be  about 
three  and  a  half  feet  long,  rapidly  approaching  the  earth  at  Saar- 
bruck,  April  i,  1826;  sound  like  thunder;  object  expanding  like  a 
sheet  (Am.  Jour.  Sci.,  1-26-133;  Quar.  Jour.  Roy.  Inst.,  24-488); 
report  by  an  astronomer,  N.  S.  Drayton  upon  an  object  duration  of 
which  seemed  to  him  extraordinary;   duration  three-quarters  of  a 
minute,  Jersey  City,  July  6,  1882  (Sci.  Amer.,  47-53);  object  like 
a  comet,  but  with  proper  motion  of  10  degrees  an  hour;   visible 
one  hour;  reported  by  Purine  and  Clancy  from  the  Cordoba  Ob- 
servatory, Argentine,  March  14,  1916  (Sci.  Amer.,  115-493);  some- 
thing like  a  signal  light,  reported  by  Glaisher,  Oct.  4,  1844;  bright 
as  Jupiter,  "sending  out  quick  flickering  waves  of  light"   (Year 
Book  of  Facts,  1845-278). 


276  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

I  think  that  with  the  object  known  as  Eddie's  "comet,"  passes 
away  the  last  of  our  susceptibility  to  the  common  fallacy  of  per- 
sonifying. It  is  one  of  the  most  deep-rooted  of  positivist  illusions — 
that  people  are  persons.  We  have  been  guilty  too  often  of  spleens 
and  spites  and  ridicules  against  astronomers,  as  if  they  were  per- 
sons, or  final  unities,  individuals,  completenesses,  or  selves — instead 
of  indeterminate  parts.  But,  so  long  as  we  remain  in  quasi-ex- 
istence,  we  can  cast  out  illusion  only  with  some  other  illusion,  though 
the  other  illusion  may  approximate  higher  to  reality.  So  we  per- 
sonify no  more — but  we  super-personify.  We  now  take  into  full 
acceptance  our  expression  that  Development  is  an  Autocracy  of  Suc- 
cessive Dominants — which  are  not  final — but  which  approximate 
higher  to  individuality  or  self-ness,  than  do  the  human  tropisms  that 
irresponsibly  correlate  to  them. 

Eddie  reported  a  celestial  object,  from  the  Observatory  at  Gra- 
hamstown,  South  Africa.  It  was  in  1890.  The  New  Dominant  was 
only  heir  presumptive  then,  or  heir  apparent  but  not  obvious.  The 
thing  that  Eddie  reported  might  as  well  have  been  reported  by  a 
night  watchman,  who  had  looked  up  through  an  unplaced  sewer 
pipe. 

It  did  not  correlate. 

The  thing  was  not  admitted  to  Monthly  Notices.  I  think  myself 
that  if  the  Editor  had  attempted  to  let  it  in — earthquake — or  a 
mysterious  fire  in  his  publishing  house. 

The  Dominants  are  jealous  gods. 

In  Nature,  presumably  a  vassal  of  the  new  god,  though  of  course 
also  plausibly  rendering  homage  to  the  old,  is  reported  a  comet- 
like  body,  of  Oct.  27,  1890,  observed  at  Grahamstown,  by  Eddie. 
It  may  have  looked  comet-like,  but  it  moved  100  degrees  while 
visible,  or  one  hundred  degrees  in  three-quarters  of  an  hour.  See 
Nature,  43-89*  9°- 

In  Nature,  44-519,  Prof.  Copeland  describes  a  similar  appear- 
ance that  he  had  seen,  Sept.  10,  1891.  Dreyer  says  (Nature,  44- 
541)  that  he  had  seen  this  object  at  the  Armagh  Observatory. 
He  likens  it  to  the  object  that  was  reported  by  Eddie.  It  was  seen 
by  Dr.  Alexander  Graham  Bell,  Sept.  u,  1891,  in  Nova  Scotia. 

But  the  Old  Dominant  was  a  jealous  god. 

So  there  were  different  observations  upon  something  that  was 
seen  in  November,  1883.  These  observations  were  Philistines  in 
1883.  In  the  Amer.  Met.  Jour.,  i-no,  a  correspondent  reports 
having  seen  an  object  like  a  comet,  with  two  tails,  one  up  and  one 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  277 

down,  Nov.  10  or  12,  1883.  Very  likely  this  phenomenon  should 
be  placed  in  our  expression  upon  torpedo-shaped  bodies  that  have 
been  seen  in  the  sky — our  data  upon  dirigibles,  or  super-Zeppelins 
— but  our  attempted  classifications  are  far  from  rigorous — or  are 
mere  gropes.  In  the  Scientific  American,  50-40,  a  correspondent 
writes  from  Humacao,  Porto  Rico,  that,  Nov.  21,  1883,  he  and 
several  other — persons — or  persons,  as  it  were — had  seen  a  ma- 
jestic appearance,  like  a  comet.  Visible  three  successive  nights:  dis- 
appeared then.  The  Editor  says  that  he  can  offer  no  explanation. 
If  accepted,  this  thing  must  have  been  close  to  the  earth.  If  it 
had  been  a  comet,  it  would  have  been  seen  widely,  and  the  news 
would  have  been  telegraphed  over  the  world,  says  the  Editor. 
Upon  page  07  of  this  volume  of  the  Scientific  American,  a  cor- 
respondent writes  that,  at  Sulphur  Springs,  Ohio,  he  had  seen 
"a  wonder  in  the  sky,"  at  about  the  same  date.  It  was  torpedo- 
shaped,  or  something  with  a  nucleus,  at  each  end  of  which  was 
a  tail.  Again  the  Editor  says  that  he  can  offer  no  explanation: 
that  the  object  was  not  a  comet.  He  associates  it  with  the  at- 
mospheric effects  general  in  1883.  But  it  will  be  our  expression 
that,  in  England  and  Holland,  a  similar  object  was  seen  in  Novem- 
ber, 1882. 

In  the  Scientific  American ,  40-294,  is  published  a  letter  from 
Henry  Harrison,  of  Jersey  City,  copied  from  the  N.  Y.  Tribune: 
that  upon  the  evening  of  April  13,  1879,  Mr.  Harrison  was  search- 
ing for  Brorsen's  comet,  when  he  saw  an  object  that  was  moving 
so  rapidly  that  it  could  not  have  been  a  comet.  He  called  a  friend 
to  look,  and  his  observation  was  confirmed.  At  two  o'clock  in  tHe 
morning  this  object  was  still  visible.  In  the  Scientific  American 
Supplement,  7-2885,  Mr.  Harrison  disclaims  sensationalism,  which 
he  seems  to  think  unworthy,  and  gives  technical  details:  he  says  that 
the  object  was  seen  by  Mr.  J.  Spencer  Devoe,  of  Manhattan- 
ville. 


CHAPTER  XXV 

A  FORMATION  having  the  shape  of  a  dirigible."  It  was  report- 
ed from  Huntington,  West  Virginia  (Sci.  Amer.,  115-241). 
Luminous  object  that  was  seen  July  19,  1916,  at  about  eleven 
p.  m.  Observed  through  "rather  powerful  field  glasses,"  it  looked 
to  be  about  two  degrees  long  and  half  a  degree  wide.  It  gradually 
dimmed,  disappeared,  reappeared,  and  then  faded  out  of  sight. 
Another  person — as  we  say:  it  would  be  too  inconvenient  to  hold 
to  our  intermediatist  recognitions — another  person  who  observed 
this  phenomenon  suggested  to  the  writer  of  the  account  that  the 
object  was  a  dirigible,  but  the  writer  says  that  faint  stars  could 
be  seen  behind  it.  This  would  seem  really  to  oppose  our  notion 
of  a  dirigible  visitor  to  this  earth — except  for  the  inconclusiveness 
of  all  things  in  a  mode  of  seeming  that  is  not  final — or  we  suggest 
that  behind  some  parts  of  the  object,  thing,  construction,  faint 
stars  were  seen.  We  find  a  slight  discussion  here.  Prof.  H.  M. 
Russell  thinks  that  the  phenomenon  was  a  detached  cloud  of  aurora 
borealis.  Upon  page  369  of  this  volume  of  the  Scientific  American, 
another  correlator  suggests  that  it  was  a  light  from  a  blast  furnace 
— disregarding  that,  if  there  be  blast  furnaces  in  or  near  Hunting- 
ton,  their  reflections  would  be  commonplaces  there. 

We  now  have  several  observations  upon  cylindrical-shaped  bodies 
that  have  appeared  in  this  earth's  atmosphere:  cylindrical,  but 
pointed  at  both  ends,  or  torpedo-shaped.  Some  of  the  accounts 
are  not  very  detailed,  but  out  of  the  bits  of  description  my  own  ac- 
ceptance is  that  super-geographical  routes  are  traversed  by  torpedo- 
shaped  super-constructions  that  have  occasionally  visited,  or  that 
have  occasionally  been  driven  into  this  earth's  atmosphere.  From 
data,  the  acceptance  is  that  upon  entering  this  earth's  atmosphere, 
these  vessels  have  been  so  racked  that  had  they  not  sailed  away, 
disintegration  would  have  occurred:  that,  before  leaving  this  earth, 
they  have,  whether  in  attempted  communication  or  not,  or  in  mere 
wantonness  or  not,  dropped  objects,  which  did  almost  immediately 
violently  disintegrate  or  explode.  Upon  general  principles  we  think 
that  explosives  have  not  been  purposely  dropped,  but  that  parts 

278 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  279 

have  been  racked  off,  and  have  fallen,  exploding  like  the  things 
called  "ball  lightning."  May  have  been  objects  of  stone  or  metal 
with  inscriptions  upon  them,  for  all  we  know,  at  present.  In  all 
instances,  estimates  of  dimensions  are  valueless,  but  ratios  of  di- 
mensions are  more  acceptable.  A  thing  said  to  have  been  six  feet 
long  may  have  been  six  hundred  feet  long;  but  shape  is  not  so 
subject  to  the  illusions  of  distance. 

Nature,  40-415: 

That,  Aug.  5,  1889,  during  a  violent  storm,  an  object  that  looked 
to  be  about  15  inches  long  and  5  inches  wide,  fell,  rather  slowly,  at 
East  Twickenham,  England.  It  exploded.  No  substance  from  it 
was  found. 

L'Annee  Scientifique,  1864-54: 

That,  Oct.  10,  1864,  M.  Leverrier  had  sent  to  the  Academy  three 
letters  from  witnesses  of  a  long  luminous  body,  tapering  at  both 
ends,  that  had  been  seen  in  the  sky. 

In  Thunder  and  Lightning,  p.  87,  Flammarion  says  that  on 
Aug.  20,  1880,  during  a  rather  violent  storm,  M.  A.  Trecul,  of 
the  French  Academy,  saw  a  very  brilliant  yellowish-white  body, 
apparently  35  to  40  centimeters  long,  and  about  25  centimeters  wide. 
Torpedo-shaped.,  Or  a  cylindrical  body,  "with  slightly  conical 
ends."  It  dropped  something,  and  disappeared  in  the  clouds.  What- 
ever it  may  have  been  that  was  dropped,  it  fell  vertically,  like  a 
heavy  object,  and  left  a  luminous  train.  The  scene  of  this  occurrence 
may  have  been  far  from  the  observer.  No  sound  was  heard.  For 
M.  TrecuPs  account,  see  Comptes  Rendus,  103-849. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  1907-310: 

That,  July  2,  1907,  in  the  town  of  Burlington,  Vermont,  a  ter- 
rific explosion  had  been  heard  throughout  the  city.  A  ball  of 
light,  or  a  luminous  object,  had  been  seen  to  fall  from  the  sky — 
or  from  a  torpedo-shaped  thing,  or  construction,  in  the  sky.  No 
one  had  seen  this  thing  that  had  exploded  fall  from  a  larger  body 
that  was  in  the  sky — but  if  we  accept  that  at  the  same  time  there 
was  a  larger  body  in  the  sky 

My  own  acceptance  is  that  a  dirigible  in  the  sky,  or  a  construc- 
tion that  showed  every  sign  of  disrupting,  bad  barely  time  to  drop 
— whatever  it  did  drop — and  to  speed  away  to  safety  above. 

The  following  story  is  told,  in  the  Review,  by  Bishop  John  S. 
Michaud: 

"I  was  standing  on  the  corner  of  Church  and  College  Streets,  just 
in  front  of  the  Howard  Bank,  and  facing  east,  engaged  in  conversa- 


28o  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

tion  with  Ex-Governor  Woodbury  and  Mr.  A.  A.  Buell,  when, 
without  the  slightest  indication,  or  warning,  we  were  startled  by 
what  sounded  like  a  most  unusual  and  terrific  explosion,  evidently 
very  nearby.  Raising  my  eyes,  and  looking  eastward  along  College 
street,  I  observed  a  torpedo-shaped  body,  some  300  feet  away, 
stationary  in  appearance,  and  suspended  in  the  air,  about  50  feet 
above  the  tops  of  the  buildings.  In  size  it  was  about  6  feet  long 
by  8  inches  in  diameter,  the  shell,  or  covering,  having  a  dark  ap- 
pearance, with  here  and  there  tongues  of  fire  issuing  from  spots  on 
the  surface,  resembling  red-hot,  unburnished  copper.  Although 
stationary  when  first  noticed,  this  object  soon  began  to  move, 
rather  slowly,  and  disappeared  over  Dolan  Brothers'  store,  south- 
ward. As  it  moved,  the  covering  seemed  rupturing  in  places,  and 
through  these  the  intensely  red  flames  issued." 

Bishop  Michaud  attempts  to  correlate  it  with  meteorological  obser- 
vations. 

Because  of  the  nearby  view  this  is  perhaps  the  most  remarkable 
of  the  new  correlates,  but  the  correlate  now  coming  is  extraordinary 
because  of  the  great  number  of  recorded  observations  upon  it. 
My  own  acceptance  is  that,  upon  Nov.  17,  1882,  a  vast  dirigible 
crossed  England,  but  by  the  definiteness-indefiniteness  of  all  things 
quasi-real,  some  observations  upon  it  can  be  correlated  with  any- 
thing one  pleases. 

E.  W.  Maunder,  invited  by  the  Editors  of  the  Observatory  to  write 
some  reminiscences  for  the  sooth  number  of  their  magazine,  gives 
one  that  he  says  stands  out  (Observatory,  39-214).  It  is  upon 
something  that  he  terms  "a  strange  celestial  visitor."  Maunder 
was  at  the  Royal  Observatory,  Greenwich,  Nov.  17,  1882,  at  night. 
There  was  an  aurora,  without  features  of  special  interest.  In  the 
midst  of  the  aurora,  a  great  circular  disk  of  greenish  light  appeared 
and  moved  smoothly  across  the  sky.  But  the  circularity  was  evi- 
dently the  effect  of  foreshortening.  The  thing  passed  above  the 
moon,  and  was,  by  other  observers,  described  as  "cigar-shaped," 
"like  a  torpedo,"  "a  spindle,"  "a  shuttle."  The  idea  of  foreshorten- 
ing  is  not  mine:  Maunder  says  this.  He  says:  "Had  the  incident 
occurred  a  third  of  a  century  later,  beyond  doubt  every  one  would 
have  selected  the  same  simile — it  would  have  been  'just  like  a  Zep- 
pelin.' "  The  duration  was  about  two  minutes.  Color  said  to  have 
been  the  same  as  that  of  the  auroral  glow  in  the  north.  Neverthe- 
less, Maunder  says  that  this  thing  had  no  relation  to  auroral  phe- 
nomena. "It  appeared  to  be  a  definite  body."  Motion  too  fast 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  281 

for  a  cloud,  but  "nothing  could  be  more  unlike  the  rush  of  a  meteor." 
In  the  Philosophical  Magazine,  5-15-318,  J.  Rand  Capron,  in  a 
lengthy  paper,  alludes  throughout  to  this  phenomenon  as  an  "auroral 
beam,"  but  he  lists  many  observations  upon  its  "torpedo-shape," 
and  one  observation  upon  a  "dark  nucleus"  in  it — host  of  most 
confusing  observations — estimates  of  height  between  40  and  200 
miles — observations  in  Holland  and  Belgium.  We  are  told  that 
according  to  Capron's  spectroscopic  observations  the  phenomenon 
was  nothing  but  a  beam  of  auroral  light.  In  the  Observatory,  6-192, 
is  Maunder's  contemporaneous  account.  He  gives  apparent  approxi- 
mate length  and  breadth  at  twenty-seven  degrees  and  three  degrees 
and  a  half.  He  gives  other  observations  seeming  to  indicate  struc- 
ture— "remarkable  dark  marking  down  the  center." 

In  Nature,  27-84,  Capron  says  that  because  of  the  moonlight  he 
had  been  able  to  do  little  with  the  spectroscope. 

Color  white,  but  aurora  rosy  (Nature,  27-87). 

Bright  stars  seen  through  it,  but  not  at  the  zenith,  where  it 
looked  opaque.  This  is  the  only  assertion  of  transparency  (Nature, 
27-87).  Too  slow  for  a  meteor,  but  too  fast  for  a  cloud  (Nature, 
27-86).  "Surface  had  a  mottled  appearance"  (Nature,  27-87). 
"Very  definite  in  form,  like  a  torpedo"  (Nature,  27-100).  "Probably 
a  meteoric  object"  (Dr.  Groneman,  Nature,  27-296).  Technical 
demonstration  by  Dr.  Groneman,  that  it  was  a  cloud  of  meteoric 
matter  (Nature,  28-105).  See  Nature,  27-315,  338,  365,  388,  412, 

434- 

"Very  little  doubt  it  was  an  electric  phenomenon"  (Proctor, 
Knowledge,  2-419). 

In  the  London  Times,  Nov.  20,  1882,  the  Editor  says  that  he 
had  received  a  great  number  of  letters  upon  this  phenomenon.  He 
publishes  two.  One  correspondent  describes  it  as  "well-defined  and 
shaped  like  a  fish  .  .  .  extraordinary  and  alarming."  The  other 
correspondent  writes  of  it  as  "a  most  magnificent  luminous  mass, 
shaped  somewhat  like  a  torpedo." 


CHAPTER  XXVI 

•\TOTES  and  Queries,  5-3-306: 

J.  V  About  8  lights  that  were  seen  in  Wales,  over  an  area  of  about 
8  miles,  all  keeping  their  own  ground,  whether  moving  together 
perpendicularly,  horizontally,  or  over  a  zigzag  course.  They  looked 
like  electric  lights — disappearing,  reappearing  dimly,  then  shining 
as  bright  as  ever.  "We  have  seen  them  three  or  four  at  a  time 
afterward,  on  four  or  five  occasions." 

London  Times,  Oct.  5,  1877: 

"From  time  to  time  the  west  coast  of  Wales  seems  to  have 
been  the  scene  of  mysterious  lights.  .  .  .  And  now  we  have  a  state- 
ment from  Towyn  that  within  the  last  few  weeks  lights  of  various 
colors  have  been  seen  moving  over  the  estuary  of  the  Dysynni 
River,  and  out  to  sea.  They  are  generally  in  a  northerly  direction, 
but  sometimes  they  hug  the  shore,  and  move  at  high  velocity  for 
miles  toward  Aberdovey,  and  suddenly  disappear. 

L'Annee  Scientifique,  1877-45: 

Lights  that  appeared  in  the  sky,  above  Vence,  France,  March 
23,  1877;  described  as  balls  of  fire  of  dazzling  brightness;  appeared 
from  a  cloud  about  a  degree  in  diameter;  moved  relatively  slowly. 
They  were  visible  more  than  an  hour,  moving  northward.  It  is 
said  that  eight  or  ten  years  before  similar  lights  or  objects  had 
been  seen  in  the  sky,  at  Vence. 

London  Times,  Sept.  19,  1848: 

That,  at  Inverness,  Scotland,  two  large,  bright  lights  that  looked 
like  stars  had  been  seen  in  the  sky:  sometimes  stationary,  but  occa- 
sionally moving  at  high  velocity. 

L'Annee  Scientifique,  1888-66: 

Observed  near  St.  Petersburg,  July  30,  1880,  in  the  evening: 
a  large  spherical  light  and  two  smaller  ones,  moving  along  a  ravine: 
visible  three  minutes;  disappearing  without  noise. 

Nature,  35-173- 

That,  at  Yloilo,  Sept.  30,  1886,  was  seen  a  luminous  object  the 
size  of  the  full  moon.  It  "floated"  slowly  "northward,"  followed 
by  smaller  ones  close  to  it. 

282 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  283 

"The  False  Lights  of  Durham." 

Every  now  and  then  in  the  English  newspapers,  in  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  there  is  something  about  lights  that  were 
seen  against  the  sky,  but  as  if  not  far  above  land,  oftenest  upon 
the  coast  of  Durham.  They  were  mistaken  for  beacons  by  sailors. 
Wreck  after  wreck  occurred.  The  fishermen  were  accused  of  dis- 
playing false  lights  and  profiting  by  wreckage.  The  fishermen  an- 
swered that  mostly  only  old  vessels,  worthless  except  for  insur- 
ance, were  so  wrecked. 

In  1866  (London  Times,  Jan.  9,  1866)  popular  excitement  be- 
came intense.  There  was  an  investigation.  Before  a  commission, 
headed  by  Admiral  Collinson,  testimony  was  taken.  One  witness 
described  the  light  that  had  deceived  him  as  "considerably  elevated 
above  ground."  No  conclusion  was  reached:  the  lights  were  called 
"the  mysterious  lights."  But  whatever  the  "false  lights  of  Dur- 
ham" may  have  been,  they  were  unaffected  by  the  investigation. 
In  1867,  the  Tyne  Pilotage  Board  took  the  matter  up.  Opinion  of 
the  Mayor  of  Tyne — "a  mysterious  affair." 

In  the  Report  of  the  British  Association,  1877-152,  there  is  a 
description  of  a  group  of  "meteors"  that  traveled  with  "remark- 
able slowness."  They  were  in  sight  about  three  minutes.  "Re- 
markable," it  seems,  is  scarcely  strong  enough:  one  reads  of  "re- 
markable" as  applied  to  a  duration  of  three  seconds.  These  "me- 
teors" had  another  peculiarity;  they  left  no  train.  They  are  de- 
scribed as  "seemingly  huddled  together  like  a  flock  of  wild  geese, 
and  moving  with  the  same  velocity  and  grace  of  regularity." 

Jour.  Roy.  Astro.  Soc.  of  Canada,  Nov.  and  Dec.,  1913: 

That,  according  to  many  observations  collected  by  Prof.  Chant, 
of  Toronto,  there  appeared,  upon  the  night  of  Feb.  9,  1913,  a  spec- 
tacle that  was  seen  in  Canada,  the  United  States,  and  at  sea,  and 
in  Bermuda.  A  luminous  body  was  seen.  To  it  there  was  a  long 
tail.  The  body  grew  rapidly  larger.  "Observers  differ  as  to  whether 
the  body  was  single,  or  was  composed  of  three  or  four  parts,  with 
a  tail  to  each  part."  The  group,  or  complex  structure,  moved  with 
"a  peculiar,  majestic  deliberation."  "It  disappeared  in  the  distance, 
and  another  group  emerged  from  its  place  of  origin.  Onward  they 
moved,  at  the  same  deliberate  pace,  in  twos  or  threes  or  fours." 
They  disappeared.  A  third  group,  or  a  third  structure,  followed. 

Some  observers  compared  the  spectacle  to  a  fleet  of  airships: 
others  to  battleships  attended  by  cruisers  and  destroyers. 


284  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

According  to  one  writer: 

"There  were  probably  30  or  32  bodies,  and  the  peculiar  thing 
about  them  was  their  moving  in  fours  and  threes  and  twos,  abreast 
of  one  another;  and  so  perfect  was  the  lining  up  that  you  would 
have  thought  it  was  an  aerial  fleet  maneuvering  after  rigid  drill- 
ing." 

Nature,  May  25,  1893: 

A  letter  from  Capt.  Charles  J.  Norcock,  of  H.  M.  S.  Caroline: 

That,  upon  the  24th  of  February,  1893,  at  10  p.  m.,  between 
Shanghai  and  Japan,  the  officer  of  the  watch  had  reported  "some 
unusual  lights." 

They  were  between  the  ship  and  a  mountain.  The  mountain  was 
about  6,000  feet  high.  The  lights  seemed  to  be  globular.  They 
moved  sometimes  massed,  but  sometimes  strung  out  in  an  irregular 
line.  They  bore  "northward,"  until  lost  to  sight.  Duration  two 
hours. 

The  next  night  the  lights  were  seen  again. 

They  were,  for  a  time,  eclipsed  by  a  small  island.  They  bore 
north  at  about  the  same  speed  and  in  about  the  same  direction 
as  speed  and  direction  of  the  Caroline.  But  they  were  lights  that 
cast  a  reflection:  there  was  a  glare  upon  the  horizon  under  them. 
A  telescope  brought  out  but  few  details:  that  they  were  reddish, 
and  seemed  to  emit  a  faint  smoke.  This  time  the  duration  was 
seven  and  a  half  hours. 

Then  Capt.  Norcock  says  that,  in  the  same  general  locality,  and 
at  about  the  same  time,  Capt.  Castle,  of  H.  M.  S.  Leander,  had  seen 
lights.  He  had  altered  his  course  and  had  made  toward  them.  The 
lights  had  fled  from  him.  At  least,  they  had  moved  higher  in  the 
sky. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  March,  1904-115: 

Report  from  the  observations  of  three  members  of  his  crew  by 
Lieut.  Frank  H.  Schofield,  U.  S.  N.,  of  the  U.  S.  S.  Supply: 

Feb.  24,  1904.  Three  luminous  objects,  of  different  sizes,  the 
largest  having  an  apparent  area  of  about  six  suns.  When  first 
sighted,  they  were  not  very  high.  They  were  below  clouds  of  an 
estimated  height  of  about  one  mile. 

They  fled,  or  they  evaded,  or  they  turned. 

They  went  up  into  the  clouds  below  which  they  had,  at  first, 
been  sighted. 

Their  unison  of  movement. 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  285 

But  they  were  of  different  sizes,  and  of  different  susceptibilities 
to  all  forces  of  this  earth  and  of  the  air. 

Monthly  Weather  Review,  Aug.,  1898-358: 

Two  letters  from  C.  N.  Crotsenburg,  Crow  Agency,  Montana: 

That,  in  the  summer  of  1896,  when  this  writer  was  a  railroad 
postal  clerk — or  one  who  was  experienced  in  train-phenomena — 
while  his  train  was  going  "northward,"  from  Trenton,  Mo.,  he  and 
another  clerk  saw,  in  the  darkness  of  a  heavy  rain,  a  light  that  ap- 
peared to  be  round,  and  of  a  dull-rose  color,  and  seemed  to  be  about 
a  foot  in  diameter.  It  seemed  to  float  within  a  hundred  feet  of  the 
earth,  but  soon  rose  high,  or  "midway  between  horizon  and  zenith." 
The  wind  was  quite  strong  from  the  east,  but  the  light  held  a 
course  almost  due  north. 

Its  speed  varied.  Sometimes  it  seemed  to  outrun  the  train  "con- 
siderably." At  other  times  it  seemed  to  fall  behind.  The  mail 
clerks  watched  until  the  town  of  Linville,  Iowa,  was  reached.  Be- 
hind the  depot  of  this  town,  the  light  disappeared,  and  was  not  seen 
again.  All  this  time  there  had  been  rain,  but  very  little  lightning, 
but  Mr.  Crotsenburg  offers  the  explanation  that  it  was  "ball  light- 
ning." 

The  Editor  of  the  Review  disagrees.  He  thinks  that  the  light 
may  have  been  a  reflection  from  the  rain,  or  fog,  or  from  leaves  of 
trees,  glistening  with  rain,  or  the  train's  light — not  lights. 

In  the  December  number  of  the  Review  is  a  letter  from  Ed- 
ward M.  Boggs — that  the  light  was  a  reflection,  perhaps,  from  the 
glare — one  light,  this  time — from  the  locomotive's  fire-box,  upon 
wet  telegraph  wires — an  appearance  that  might  not  be  striated  by  the 
wires,  but  consolidated  into  one  rotundity — that  it  had  seemed  to 
oscillate  with  the  undulations  of  the  wires,  and  had  seemed  to 
change  horizontal  distance  with  the  varying  angles  of  reflection,  and 
had  seemed  to  advance  or  fall  behind,  when  the  train  had  rounded 
curves. 

All  of  which  is  typical  of  the  best  of  quasi-reasoning.  It  includes 
and  assimilates  diverse  data:  but  it  excludes  that  which  will  de- 
stroy it: 

That,  acceptably,  the  telegraph  wires  were  alongside  the  track 
beyond,  as  well  as  leading  to  Linville. 

Mr.  Crotsenburg  thinks  of  "ball  lightning,"  which,  though  a 
sore  bewilderment  to  most  speculation,  is  usually  supposed  to  be 
a  correlate  with  the  old  system  of  thought:  but  his  awareness  of 


286  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

"something  else"  is  expressed  in  other  parts  of  his  letters,  when 
he  says  that  he  has  something  to  tell  that  is  "so  strange  that  I 
should  never  have  mentioned  it,  even  to  my  friends,  had  it  not 
been  corroborated  ...  so  unreal  that  I  hesitated  to  speak  of  it,  fear- 
ing that  it  was  some  freak  of  the  imagination." 


CHAPTER  XXVII 

VAST  and  black.    The  thing  that  was  poised,  like  a  crow  over 
the  moon. 

Round  and  smooth.  Cannon  balls.  Things  that  have  fallen  from 
the  sky  to  this  earth. 

Our  slippery  brains. 

Things  like  cannon  balls  have  fallen,  in  storms,  upon  this  earth. 
Like  cannon  balls  are  things  that,  in  storms,  have  fallen  to  this 
earth. 

Showers  of  blood. 

Showers  of  blood. 

Showers  of  blood. 

Whatever  it  may  have  been,  something  like  red-brick  dust,  or  a 
red  substance  in  a  dried  state,  fell  at  Piedmont,  Italy,  Oct.  27,  1814 
(Electric  Magazine,  68-437).  A  red  powder  fell,  in  Switzerland, 
winter  of  1867  (Pop.  Sci.  Rev.,  10-112) 

That  something,  far  from  this  earth  had  bled — super-dragon  that 
had  rammed  a  comet 

Or  that  there  are  oceans  of  blood  somewhere  in  the  sky — sub- 
stance that  dries,  and  falls  in  a  powder — wafts  for  ages  in  pow- 
dered form — that  there  is  a  vast  area  that  will  some  day  be  known 
to  aviators  as  the  Desert  of  Blood.  We  attempt  little  of  super- 
topography,  at  present,  but  Ocean  of  Blood,  or  Desert  of  Blood — 
or  both — Italy  is  nearest  to  it — or  to  them. 

I  suspect  that  there  were  corpuscles  in  the  substance  that  fell 
in  Switzerland,  but  all  that  could  be  published  in  1867  was  that 
in  this  substance  there  was  a  high  proportion  of  "variously  shaped 
organic  matter." 

At  Giessen,  Germany,  in  1821,  according  to  the  Report  of  the 
British  Association,  5-2,  fell  a  rain  of  a  peach-red  color.  In  this 
rain  were  flakes  of  a  hyacinthine  tint.  It  is  said  that  this  sub- 
stance was  organic:  we  are  told  that  it  was  pyrrhine. 

But  distinctly  enough,  we  are  told  of  one  red  rain  that  it  was 
of  corpuscular  composition — red  snow,  rather.  It  fell,  March  12, 
1876,  near  the  Crystal  Palace,  London  (Year  Book  of  Facts, 

2*7 


288  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

1876-89;  Nature,  13-414).  As  to  the  "red  snow"  of  polar  and 
mountainous  regions,  we  have  no  opposition,  because  that  "snow" 
has  never  been  seen  to  fall  from  the  sky:  it  is  a  growth  of  micro- 
organisms, or  of  a  "protococcus,"  that  spreads  over  snow  that  is  on 
the  ground.  This  time  nothing  is  said  of  "sand  from  the  Sahara." 
It  is  said  of  the  red  matter  that  fell  in  London,  March  12,  1876, 
that  it  was  composed  of  corpuscles 

Of  course: 

That  they  looked  like  "vegetable  cells." 

A  note: 

That  nine  days  before  had  fallen  the  red  substance — flesh — 
whatever  it  may  have  been — of  Bath  County,  Kentucky. 

I  think  that  a  super-egotist,  vast,  but  not  so  vast  as  it  had  sup- 
posed, had  refused  to  move  to  one  side  for  a  comet. 

We  summarize  our  general  super-geographical  expressions: 

Gelatinous  regions,  sulphurous  regions,  frigid  and  tropical  re- 
gions: a  region  that  has  been  Source  of  Life  relatively  to  this 
earth:  regions  wherein  there  is  density  so  great  that  things  from 
them,  entering  this  earth's  thin  atmosphere,  explode. 

We  have  had  a  datum  of  explosive  hailstones.  We  now  have 
support  to  the  acceptance  that  they  had  been  formed  in  a  medium 
far  denser  than  air  of  this  earth  at  sea-level.  In  the  Popular  Science 
News,  22-38,  is  an  account  of  ice  that  had  been  formed,  under 
great  pressure,  in  the  laboratory  of  the  University  of  Virginia. 
When  released,  and  brought  into  contact  with  ordinary  air,  this  ice 
exploded. 

And  again  the  flesh-like  substance  that  fell  in  Kentucky:  its 
flake-like  formation.  Here  is  a  phenomenon  that  is  familiar  to  us: 
it  suggests  flattening,  under  pressure.  But  the  extraordinary  in- 
ference is — pressure  not  equal  on  all  sides.  In  the  Annual  Record  of 
Science,  1873-350,  it  is  said  that,  in  1873,  after  a  heavy  thunder- 
storm in  Louisiana,  a  tremendous  number  of  fish  scales  were  found, 
for  a  distance  of  forty  miles,  along  the  banks  of  the  Mississippi 
River:  bushels  of  them  picked  up  in  single  places:  large  scales 
that  were  said  to  be  of  the  gar  fish,  a  fish  that  weighs  from  five 
to  fifty  pounds.  It  seems  impossible  to  accept  this  identification: 
one  thinks  of  a  substance  that  had  been  pressed  into  flakes  or  scales. 
And  round  hailstones  with  wide  thin  margins  of  ice  irregularly  around 
them — still,  such  hailstones  seem  to  me  more  like  things  that  had 
been  stationary:  had  been  held  in  a  field  of  thin  ice.  In  the 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  289 

Illustrated  London  News,  34-546,  are  drawings  of  hailstones  so 
margined,  as  if  they  had  been  held  in  a  sheet  of  ice. 

Some  day  we  shall  have  an  expression  which  will  be,  to  our 
advanced  primitiveness,  a  great  joy: 

That  devils  have  visited  this  earth:  foreign  devils:  human-like 
beings,  with  pointed  beards:  good  singers;  one  shoe  ill-fitting — 
but  with  sulphurous  exhalations,  at  any  rate.  I  have  been  impressed 
with  the  frequent  occurrence  of  sulphurousness  with  things  that 
come  from  the  sky.  A  fall  of  jagged  pieces  of  ice,  Orkney,  July 
24,  1818  (Trans.  Roy.  Soc.  Edin.,  9-187).  They  had  a  strong 
sulphurous  odor.  And  the  coke — or  the  substance  that  looked  like 
coke — that  fell  at  Mortree,  France,  April  24,  1887:  with  it  fell  a 
sulphurous  substance.  The  enormous  round  things  that  rose  from 
the  ocean,  near  the  Victoria.  Whether  we  still  accept  that  they  were 
super-constructions  that  had  come  from  a  denser  atmosphere  and, 
in  danger  of  disruption,  had  plunged  into  the  ocean  for  relief,  then 
rising  and  continuing  on  their  way  to  Jupiter  or  Uranus — it  was 
reported  that  they  spread  a  "stench  of  sulphur."  At  any  rate, 
this  datum  of  proximity  is  against  the  conventional  explanation  that 
these  things  did  not  rise  from  the  ocean,  but  rose  far  away  above 
the  horizon,  with  illusion  of  nearness. 

And  the  things  that  were  seen  in  the  sky  July,  1898:  I  have  an- 
other note.  In  Nature,  58-224,  a  correspondent  writes  that,  upon 
July  i,  1898,  at  Sedberg,  he  had  seen  in  the  sky — a  red  object — or, 
in  his  own  wording,  something  that  looked  like  the  red  part  of  a 
rainbow,  about  10  degrees  long.  But  the  sky  was  dark  at  the 
time.  The  sun  had  set.  A  heavy  rain  was  falling. 

Throughout  this  book,  the  datum  that  we  are  most  impressed 
with: 

Successive  falls. 

Or  that,  if  upon  one  small  area,  things  fall  from  the  sky,  and 
then,  later,  fall  again  upon  the  same  small  area,  they  are  not 
products  of  a  whirlwind,  which  though  sometimes  axially  stationary, 
discharges  tangentially 

So  the  frogs  that  fell  at  Wigan.  I  have  looked  that  matter  up 
again.  Later  more  frogs  fell. 

As  to  our  data  of  gelatinous  substance  said  to  have  fallen  to 
this  earth  with  meteorites,  it  is  our  expression  that  meteorites,  tear- 
ing through  the  shaky,  protoplasmic  seas  of  Genesistrine — against 
which  we  warn  aviators,  or  they  may  find  themselves  suffocating  in 
a  reservoir  of  life,  or  stuck  like  currants  in  a  blanc  mange — that 


2go  BOOK  OF  JHE  DAMNED 

meteorites  detach  gelatinous,  or  protoplasmic,  lumps  that  fall  with 
them. 

Now  the  element  of  positiveness  in  our  composition  yearns  for 
the  appearance  of  completeness.  Super-geographical  lakes  with  fishes 
in  them.  Meteorites  that  plunge  through  these  lakes,  on  their 
way  to  this  earth.  The  positiveness  in  our  make-up  must  have 
egression  in  at  least  one  record  of  a  meteorite  that  has  brought 
down  a  lot  of  fishes  with  it 

Nature,  3-512: 

That,  near  the  bank  of  a  river,  in  Peru,  Feb.  4,  1871,  a  me- 
teorite fell.  "On  the  spot,  it  is  reported,  several  dead  fishes  were 
found,  of  different  species."  The  attempt  to  correlate  is — that  the 
fishes  "are  supposed  to  have  been  lifted  out  of  the  river  and  dashed 
against  the  stones." 

Whether  this  be  imaginable  or  not  depends  upon  each  one's  own 
hypnoses. 

Nature,  4-169: 

That  the  fishes  had  fallen  among  the  fragments  of  the  meteorite. 

Popular  Science  Review,  4-126: 

That  one  day,  Mr.  Le  Gould,  an  Australian  scientist,  was  travel- 
ing in  Queensland.  He  saw  a  tree  that  had  been  broken  off  close 
to  the  ground.  Where  the  tree  had  been  broken  was  a  great  bruise. 
Near  by  was  an  object  that  "resembled  a  ten-inch  shot." 

A  good  many  pages  back  there  was  an  instance  of  overshadow- 
ing, I  think.  The  little  carved  stone  that  fell  at  Tarbes  is  my  own 
choice  as  the  most  impressive  of  our  new  correlates.  It  was  coated 
with  ice,  remember.  Suppose  we  should  sift  and  sift  and  discard 
half  the  data  in  this  book — suppose  only  that  one  datum  should 
survive.  To  call  attention  to  the  stone  of  Tarbes  would,  in  my 
opinion,  be  doing  well  enough,  for  whatever  the  spirit  of  this  book 
is  trying  to  do.  Nevertheless,  it  seems  to  me  that  a  datum  that 
preceded  it  was  slightingly  treated. 

The  disk  of  quartz,  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky,  after  a 
meteoric  explosion: 

Said  to  have  fallen  at  the  plantation  Bleijendal,  Dutch  Guiana: 
sent  to  the  Museum  of  Leyden  by  M.  van  Sypesteyn,  adjutant  to 
the  Governor  of  Dutch  Guiana  (Notes  and  Queries,  2-8-92). 

And  the  fragments  that  fall  from  super-geographic  ice  fields: 
flat  pieces  of  ice  with  icicles  on  them.  I  think  that  we  did  not 
emphasize  enough  that,  if  these  structures  were  not  icicles,  but 
crystalline  protuberances,  such  crystalline  formations  indicate  long 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  291 

suspension  quite  as  notably  as  would  icicles.  In  the  Popular  Science 
News,  24-34,  it  is  said  that  in  1869,  near  Tiflis,  fell  large  hail- 
stones with  long  protuberances.  "The  most  remarkable  point  in 
connection  with  the  hailstones  is  the  fact  that,  judging  from  our 
present  knowledge,  a  very  long  time  must  have  been  occupied  in 
their  formation."  According  to  the  Geological  Magazine,  7-27,  this 
fall  occurred  May  27,  1869.  The  writer  in  the  Geological  Maga- 
zine says  that  of  all  theories  that  he  had  ever  heard  of,  not  one 
could  give  him  light  as  to  this  occurrence — "these  growing  crystal- 
line forms  must  have  been  suspended  a  long  time" 

Again  and  again  this  phenomenon: 

Fourteen  days  later,  at  about  the  same  place,  more  of  these 
hailstones  fell. 

Rivers  of  blood  that  vein  albuminous  seas,  or  an  egg-like  com- 
position, in  the  incubation  of  which  this  earth  is  a  local  center  of 
development — that  there  are  super-arteries  of  blood  in  Genesistrine: 
that  sunsets  are  consciousness  of  them:  that  they  flush  the  skies 
withi  northern  lights  sometimes:  super-embryonic  reservoirs  from 
which  life-forms  emanate 

Or  that  our  whole  solar  system  is  a  living  thing:  that  showers 
of  blood  upon  this  earth  are  its  internal  hemorrhages 

Or  vast  living  things  in  the  sky,  as  there  are  vast  living  things  in 
the  oceans 

Or  some  one  especial  thing:  an  especial  time:  an  especial  place. 
A  thing  the  size  of  the  Brooklyn  Bridge.  It's  alive  in  outer  space 
— something  the  size  of  Central  Park  kills  it 

It  drips. 

We  think  of  the  ice  fields  above  this  earth:  which  do  not,  them- 
selves, fall  to  this  earth,  but  from  which  water  does  fall 

Popular  Science  News,  35-104: 

That,  according  to  Prof.  Luigi  Palazzo,  head  of  the  Italian 
Meteorological  Bureau,  upon  May  15,  1890,  at  Messignadi,  Cala- 
bria, something  the  color  of  fresh  blood  fell  from  the  sky. 

This  substance  was  examined  in  the  public-health  laboratories  of 
Rome. 

It  was  found  to  be  blood. 

"The  most  probable  explanation  of  this  terrifying  phenomenon  is 
that  migratory  birds  (quails  or  swallows)  were  caught  and  torn 
in  a  violent  wind." 

So  the  substance  was  identified  as  birds'  blood 

What  matters  it  what  the  microscopists  of  Rome  said — or  had 


292  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

to  say — and  what  matters  it  that  we  point  out  that  there  is  no 
assertion  that  there  was  a  violent  wind  at  the  time — and  that  such 
a  substance  would  be  almost  infinitely  dispersed  in  a  violent  wind 
— that  no  bird  was  said  to  have  fallen  from  the  sky — or  said  to 
have  been  seen  in,  the  sky — that  not  a  feather  of  a  bird  is  said  to 
have  been  seen-- — 

This  one  datum: 

The  fall  of  blood  from  the  sky 

But  later,  in  the  same  place,  blood  again  fell  from  the  sky. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 

"\  TOTES  and  Queries,  7-8-508: 

JL\  A  correspondent  who  had  been  to  Devonshire  writes  for 
information  as  to  a  story  that  he  had  heard  there:  of  an  occur- 
rence of  about  thirty-five  years  before  the  date  of  writing: 

Of  snow  upon  the  ground — of  all  South  Devonshire  waking  up 
one  morning  to  find  such  tracks  in  the  snow  as  had  never  before 
been  heard  of — "clawed  footmarks"  or  "an  unclassifiable  form" — 
alternating  at  huge  but  regular  intervals  with  what  seemed  to  be 
the  impression  of  the  point  of  a  stick — but  the  scattering  of  the 
prints — amazing  expanse  of  territory  covered — obstacles,  such  as 
hedges,  walls,  houses,  seemingly  surmounted 

Intense  excitement — that  the  track  had  been  followed  by  hunts- 
men and  hounds,  until  they  had  come  to  a  forest — from  which  the 
hounds  had  retreated,  baying  and  terrified,  so  that  no  one  had  dared 
to  enter  the  forest. 

Notes  and  Queries,  7-9-18: 

Whole  occurrence  well-remembered  by  a  correspondent:  a  badger 
had  left  marks  hi  the  snow:  this  was  determined,  and  the  excite- 
ment had  "dropped  to  a  dead  calm  in  a  single  day." 

Notes  and  Queries,  7-9-70: 

That  for  years  a  correspondent  had  had  a  tracing  of  the  prints, 
which  his  mother  had  taken  from  those  in  the  snow  in  her  garden, 
in  Exmouth:  that  they  were  hoof-like  marks — but  had  been  made 
by  a  biped. 

Notes  and  Queries,  7-9-253: 

Well  remembered  by  another  correspondent,  who  writes  of  the 
excitement  and  consternation  of  "some  classes."  He  s?ys  that  a 
kangaroo  had  escaped  from  a  menagerie — "the  footprints  being  so 
peculiar  and  far  apart  gave  rise  to  a  scare  that  the  devil  was 
loose." 

We  have  had  a  story,  and  now  we  shall  tell  it  over  from  con- 
temporaneous sources.  We  have  had  the  later  accounts  first  very 
largely  for  an  impression  of  the  correlating  effect  that  time  brings 

293 


294  BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

about,  by  addition,  disregard  and  distortion.  For  instance,  the 
"dead  calm  in  a  single  day."  If  I  had  found  that  the  excitement 
did  die  out  rather  soon,  I'd  incline  to  accept  that  nothing  ex- 
traordinary had  occurred. 

I  found  that  the  excitement  had  continued  for  weeks. 

I  recognize  this  as  a  well-adapted  thing  to  say,  to  divert  atten- 
tion from  a  discorrelate. 

All  phenomena  are  "explained"  in  the  terms  of  the  Dominant  of 
their  era.  This  is  why  we  give  up  trying  really  to  explain,  and 
content  ourselves  with  expressing.  Devils  that  might  print  marks 
in  snow  are  correlates  to  the  third  Dominant  back  from  this  era 
So  it  was  an  adjustment  by  nineteenth-century  correlates,  or  hu- 
man tropisms,  to  say  that  the  marks  in  the  snow  were  clawed.  Hoof- 
like  marks  are  not  only  horsey  but  devilish.  It  had  to  be  said  in 
the  nineteenth  century  that  those  prints  showed  claw-marks.  We 
shall  see  that  this  was  stated  by  Prof.  Owen,  one  of  the  greatest 
biologists  of  his  day — except  that  Darwin  didn't  think  so.  But 
I  shall  give  reference  to  two  representations  of  them  that  can  be 
seen  in  the  New  York  Public  Library.  In  neither  representation 
is  there  the  faintest  suggestion  of  a  claw-mark.  There  never  has 
been  a  Prof.  Owen  who  has  explained:  he  has  correlated. 

Another  adaptation,  in  the  later  accounts,  is  that  of  leading 
this  discorrelate  to  the  Old  Dominant  into  the  familiar  scenery 
of  a  fairy  story,  and  discredit  it  by  assimilation  to  the  conven- 
tionally fictitious — so  the  idea  of  the  baying,  terrified  hounds,  and 
forest  like  enchanted  forests,  which  no  one  dared  to  enter.  Hunting 
parties  were  organized,  but  the  baying,  terrified  hounds  do  not  ap- 
pear in  contemporaneous  accounts. 

The  story  of  the  kangaroo  looks  like  adaptation  to  needs  for 
an  animal  that  could  spring  far,  because  marks  were  found  in  the 
snow  on  roofs  of  houses.  But  so  astonishing  is  the  extent  of  snow 
that  was  marked  that  after  a  while  another  kangaroo  was  added. 

But  the  marks  were  in  single  lines. 

My  own  acceptance  is  that  not  less  than  a  thousand  one-legged 
kangaroos,  each  shod  with  a  very  small  horseshoe  could  have  marked 
that  snow  of  Devonshire. 

London  Times,  Feb.  16,  1855: 

"Considerable  sensation  has  been  caused  in  the  towns  of  Tops- 
ham,  Lymphstone,  Exmouth,  Teignmouth,  and  Dawlish,  in  Devon- 
shire, in  consequence  of  the  discovery  of  a  vast  number  of  foot 
tracks  of  a  most  strange  and  mysterious  description." 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  295 

The  story  is  of  an  incredible  multiplicity  of  marks  discovered  in 
the  morning  of  Feb.  8,  1855,  in  the  snow,  by  the  inhabitants  of  many 
towns  and  regions  between  towns.  This  great  area  must  of  course 
be  disregarded  by  Prof.  Owen  and  the  other  correlators.  The  tracks 
were  in  all  kinds  of  unaccountable  places:  in  gardens  enclosed  by 
high  walls,  and  up  on  the  tops  of  houses,  as  well  as  in  the  open 
fields.  There  was  in  Lymphstone  scarcely  one  unmarked  garden. 
We've  had  heroic  disregards  but  I  think  that  here  disregard  was 
titanic.  And,  because  they  occurred  in  single  lines,  the  marks  are 
said  to  have  been  "more  like  those  of  a  biped  than  of  a  quadruped" 
—as  if  a  biped  would  place  one  foot  precisely  ahead  of  another— 
unless  it  hopped — but  then  we  have  to  think  of  a  thousand,  or  of 
thousands. 

It  is  said  that  the  marks  were  "generally  8  inches  in  advance  of 
each  other." 

"The  impression  of  the  foot  closely  resembles  that  of  a  donkey's 
shoe,  and  measured  from  an  inch  and  a  half,  in  some  instances,  to 
two  and  a  half  inches  across." 

Or  the  impressions  were  cones  in  incomplete,  or  crescentic  basins. 

The  diameters  equaled  diameters  of  very  young  colts'  hoofs: 
too  small  to  be  compared  with  marks  of  donkey's  hoofs. 
*  "On  Sunday  last  the  Rev.  Mr.  Musgrave  alluded  to  the  sub- 
ject in  his  sermon  and  suggested  the  possibility  of  the  footprints 
being  those  of  a  kangaroo,  but  this  could  scarcely  have  been  the 
case,  as  they  were  found  on  both  sides  of  the  Este.  At  present 
it  remains  a  mystery,  and  many  superstitious  people  in  the  above 
named  towns  are  actually  afraid  to  go  outside  their  doors  after 
night." 

The  Este  is  a  body  of  water  two  miles  wide. 

London  Times,  March  6,  1855: 

"The  interest  in  this  matter  has  scarcely  yet  subsided,  many 
inquiries  still  being  made  into  the  origin  of  the  footprints,  which 
caused  so  much  consternation  upon  the  morning  of  the  8th  ult.  In 
addition  to  the  circumstances  mentioned  in  the  Times  a  little  while 
ago,  it  may  be  stated  that  at  Dawlish  a  number  of  persons  sallied 
out,  armed  with  guns  and  other  weapons,  for  the  purpose,  if  pos- 
sible, of  discovering  and  destroying  the  animal  which  was  supposed 
to  have  been  so  busy  in  multiplying  its  footprints.  As  might  have 
been  expected,  the  party  returned  as  they  went.  Various  specula- 
tions have  been  made  as  to  the  cause  of  the  footprints.  Some  have 
asserted  that  they  are  those  of  a  kangaroo,  while  others  affirm  that 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 

they  are  the  impressions  of  claws  of  large  birds  driven  ashore  by 
stress  of  weather.  On  more  than  one  occasion  reports  have  been 
circulated  that  an  animal  from  a  menagerie  had  been  caught,  but 
the  matter  at  present  is  as  much  involved  in  mystery  as  ever  it 
was." 

In  the  Illustrated  London  News,  the  occurrence  is  given  a  great 
deal  of  space.  In  the  issue  of  Feb.  24,  1855,  a  sketch  is  given  of 
the  prints. 

I  call  them  cones  in  incomplete  basins. 

Except  that  they're  a  little  longish,  they  look  like  prints  of  hoofs 
of  horses — or,  rather,  of  colts. 

But  they're  in  a  single  line. 

It  is  said  that  the  marks  from  which  the  sketch  was  made  were  8 
inches  apart,  and  that  this  spacing  was  regular  and  invariable  "in 
every  parish."  Also  other  towns  besides  those  named  in  the  Times 
are  mentioned.  The  writer,  who  had  spent  a  winter  in  Canada,  and 
was  familiar  with  tracks  in  snow,  says  that  he  had  never  seen  "a 
more  clearly  defined  track."  Also  he  brings  out  the  point  that  was 
so  persistently  disregarded  by  Prof.  Owen  and  the  other  correlators 
•. — that  "no  known  animal  walks  in  a  line  of  single  footsteps,  not 
even  man."  With  these  wider  inclusions,  this  writer  concludes  with 
us  that  the  marks  were  not  footprints.  It  may  be  that  his  follow- 
ing observation  hits  upon  the  crux  of  the  whole  occurrence: 

That  whatever  it  may  have  been  that  had  made  the  marks,  it 
had  removed,  rather  than  pressed,  the  snow. 

According  to  his  observations  the  snow  looked  "as  if  branded 
with  a  hot  iron." 

Illustrated  London  News,  March  3,  1855-214: 

Prof.  Owen,  to  whom  a  friend  had  sent  drawings  of  the  prints, 
writes  that  there  were  claw-marks.  He  says  that  the  "track"  was 
made  by  "a"  badger. 

Six  other  witnesses  sent  letters  to  this  number  of  the  News. 
One  mentioned,  but  not  published,  is  a  notion  of  a  strayed  swan. 
Always  this  homogeneous-seeing — "a"  badger — "a"  swan — "av 
track.  I  should  have  listed  the  other  towns  as  well  as  those  men- 
tioned in  the  Times. 

A  letter  from  Mr.  Musgrave  is  published.  He,  too,  sends  a 
sketch  of  the  prints.  It,  too,  shows  a  single  line.  There  are  four 
prints,  of  which  the  third  is  a  little  out  of  line. 

There  is  no  sign  of  a  claw-mark. 

The  prints  look  like  prints  of  longish  hoofs  of  a  very  young  colt, 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED  297 

jut  they  are  not  so  definitely  outlined  as  in  the  sketch  of  Feb.  24th, 
as  if  drawn  after  disturbance  by  wind,  or  after  thawing  had  set  in. 
iMeasurements  at  places  a  mile  and  a  half  apart,  gave  the  same 
Inter-spacing — "exactly  eight  inches  and  a  half  apart." 

We  now  have  a  little  study  in  the  psychology  and  genesis  of  an 
attempted  correlation.  Mr.  Musgrave  says:  "I  found  a  very  apt 
opportunity  to  mention  the  name  'kangaroo'  in  allusion  to  the  report 
then  current."  He  says  that  he  had  no  faith  in  the  kangaroo-story 
himself,  but  was  glad  "that  a  kangaroo  was  in  the  wind,"  because 
it  opposed  "a  dangerous,  degrading,  and  false  impression  that  it  was 
the  devil." 

"Mine  was  a  word  in  season  and  did  good." 

Whether  it's  Jesuitical  or  not,  and  no  matter  what  it  is  or  isn't, 
that  is  our  own  acceptance:  that,  though  we've  often  been  carried 
away  from  this  attitude  controversially,  that  is  our  acceptance  as 
to  every  correlate  of  the  past  that  has  been  considered  in  this  book 
— relatively  to  the  Dominant  of  its  era. 

Another  correspondent  writes  that,  though  the  prints  in  all  cases 
resembled  hoof  marks,  there  were  indistinct  traces  of  claws — that 
"an"  otter  had  made  the  marks.  After  that  many  other  witnesses 
wrote  to  the  News.  The  correspondence  was  so  great  that,  in  the 
issue  of  March  roth,  only  a  selection  could  be  given.  There's  "a" 
jumping-rat  solution  and  "a"  hopping  toad  inspiration,  and  then 
some  one  came  out  strong  with  an  idea  of  "a"  hare  that  had 
galloped  with  pairs  of  feet  held  close  together,  so  as  to  make  im- 
pressions in  a  single  line. 

London  Times,  March  14,  1840: 

"Among  the  high  mountains  of  that  elevated  district  where 
Glenorchy,  Glenlyon  and  Glenochay  are  contiguous,  there  have 
been  met  with  several  times,  during  this  and  also  the  former  winter 
upon  the  snow,  the  tracks  of  an  animal  seemingly  unknown  at  pres- 
ent in  Scotland.  The  print,  in  every  respect,  is  an  exact  resem- 
blance to  that  of  a  foal  of  considerable  size,  with  this  small  differ- 
ence, perhaps,  that  the  sole  seems  a  little  longer,  or  not  so  round; 
but  as  no  one  has  had  the  good  fortune  as  yet  to  have  obtained 
a  glimpse  of  this  creature,  nothing  more  can  be  said  of  its  shape  or 
dimensions;  only  it  has  been  remarked,  from  the  depth  to  which 
the  feet  sank  in  the  snow,  that  it  must  be  a  beast  of  considerable 
size.  It  has  been  observed  also  that  its  walk  is  not  like  that  of  the 
generality  of  quadrupeds,  but  that  it  is  more  like  the  bounding  or 
leaping  of  a  horse  when  scared  or  pursued.  It  is  not  in  one  lo- 


298 


BOOK  OF  THE  DAMNED 


cality  that  its  tracks  have  been  met  with,  but  through  a  range  of 
least  twelve  miles." 

In  the  Illustfated  London  News,  March  17,  1855,  a  correspondent 
from  Heidelberg  writes,  "upon  the  authority  of  a  Polish  Doctor 
Medicine,"  that  on  the  Piashowa-gora  (Sand  Hill)  a  small  eleva- 
tion on  the  border  of  Galicia,  but  in  Russian  Poland,  such  markq 
are  to  be  seen  in  the  snow  every  year,  and  sometimes  in  the  sane 
of  this  hill,  and  "are  attributed  by  the  inhabitants  to  supernatura'j 
influences." 


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